


If I Stay Here

by Osidiano



Series: This Bird You Cannot Change [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Spiderman Fusion, Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Denial, Eventual Happy Ending, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Flashbacks, Genderfluid Character, Grief/Mourning, Identity Issues, M/M, Military Jargon, New York City, Other, Pansexual Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Avengers (2012), Racism, Sam-Centric, Samtember, Super Soldier Serum, Superheroes, Temporary Character Death, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-18 17:14:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4714022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Osidiano/pseuds/Osidiano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam comes back from Afghanistan. Steve gets pulled out of the ice. Riley won't open the damn door.</p><p>Recovery is hard, even for a strong man like Sam Wilson, but he's doing the best he can with what he's got. When the Green Goblin comes back to New York City looking for Spider-Man after a year long hiatus, Sam and Steve have no choice but to step up to the challenge of protecting their city, even if they don't much feel like heroes these days.</p><p>Also known as: The big queer superhero fix it AU where Sid messes with the MCU timeline, has a lot of unnecessary feelings about Spider-Man, and everyone is broken in New York.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This series and the fics in it are all titled after lines in Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird." Also, I don't actually know anything about the Air Force, I just pretend that my Army experiences work in all branches of the service, so please feel free to correct me, airmen. This story contains all seven prompts from Samtember 2015, and has been rewritten from its original posting, as I decided to use it for my 2015 NaNoWriMo novel. If you think any other tags should be added, please let me know in the comments.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to [radbirbRaa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/radbirbRaa/pseuds/radbirbRaa) for correcting me on how the Air Force promotion system works!

The door to Riley's room stays closed most days.

It's tough to get used to. They'd spent the better part of the last seven years together, posted to the same bases and attending the PJ Candidate Course at the same time before getting picked up for the EXO-7 project. Sam had been promoted to Staff Sergeant back in 2008 just before they transferred from the Specialized Contracting Squadron at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base because it was time and they'd needed an NCO for the new Falcon team anyway, and everyone knew he'd be better at it than Riley would.

That had pissed Riley off when they got the announcement and his own score was below the cutoff, had him swinging between hot-tempered gripes and moody pouts for a full hour before he complained about the performance reports being inflated and the whole promotion system being biased.

“Against what?” Sam had asked, fists clenched and jaw tight. He'd heard the bullshit about bias in the system ever since they got a black Senior Master Sergeant in their squadron, some nonsense about the leadership being pressured to give higher EPR scores to black airmen so they'd receive more points. Riley hadn't ever given him grief about race before, but people often let their prejudices show when it came down to matters of rank and money.

“Folks from Polk,” Riley had snapped, dead serious. The tension eased out of Sam's shoulders and he just laughed, which only made Riley glare more. “I ain't kiddin'! It's 'cause my ol' man was Army. This is some inter-service discriminatory garbage!”

“Right, right,” Sam agreed, shaking his head. “Y'know, I don't think there's anything biased about picking the Senior Airman without an Article 15 on his record.”

“Aw, hell, Wilson,” Riley had said, finally smiling. He put an arm around Sam's shoulders and gave him a good-natured shake. “You put that sense makin' away before they rip those stripes right off your arm.”

Sam stares at the closed door for a minute. They haven't joked like that since coming back, and he misses it more than anything. He misses Riley's teasing and bad jokes. Riley didn't care for dirty jokes, which in the service made him the comedic equivalent of a goddamn unicorn, and so had made it his personal mission to learn every terrible clean joke known to man. Blond jokes were his favorite, but he had a soft spot for funny similes and made-up words.

“Hey, Wilson, you wanna hear a joke?” he would ask when they were cleaning their gear after training.

“Yeah, hit me with a good one, man.”

“Okay, so these two goldfish are in a tank, and one looks over to the other one and says, 'you know how to drive this thing?!'” Sam chuckled appropriately. “Yeah? I got another one you'll like. Two soldiers, sittin' in a tank, one of 'em looks at the other and says, 'blub blub blub.'”

Sam snorted. “That was awful.”

“This one's better,” Riley promised. “Hey, Wilson; why aren't koalas actual bears?”

“I don't know, man. Why?”

“Because they don't meet the koala-fications.”

He misses Riley and how damn loud he used to be. It's so quiet in the apartment that Sam sometimes thinks he'll lose his mind. He tries not to notice, tries not to spend too much time standing in front of that closed door with one hand on the wood and his heart in his throat like he is now. Sam doesn't push, or pull, or try to drag Riley back out into the world with him. He needs time, and space, and Sam tries to respect Riley's privacy but all he wants to do is see him again.

God, he misses everything about Riley. It feels like he never sees Riley anymore, like he's been wandering through thick fog since the end of that last tour. He can't remember the last time Riley sat down with him at the kitchen table for dinner. Sam misses his Southern cooking. Riley had a grease-stained cookbook full of old Cajun recipes and his mama's comfort food that he loved and cracked open at least once a week no matter where they were stationed. He had thought it was hysterical that Sam hadn't known what grits were before they'd bunked together that first time out in Panama City in 2005, that he'd never had catfish or okra or collard greens.

“What even _are_ grits?” Sam had asked. Riley, straight-faced little bastard that he was back then, looked him right in the eye and replied with undue seriousness:

“Bark, from hominy trees. Ground down on big ol' stone mills. Native Americans ate it for, like, a thousand years before the white man came. Southern kids learn all about it in school.”

It would take Sam four months to figure out that Riley was lying. They'd been in North Carolina for freefall parachutist training at Fort Bragg that following year when Sam had asked, off-hand to their waitress as they were getting breakfast one weekend, what a hominy tree looked like. Riley choked on his coffee and she looked at Sam with such profound pity, like he was the stupidest man she'd ever met.

“Oh honey, hominy is jus' _corn_ ,” she said, and Sam had smiled at her in embarrassment and waited until she left their table before turning to glare at Riley, who had still been coughing and struggling to breathe.

“I can't believe you,” he had growled through clenched teeth.

“I can't believe you _believed me_ ,” Riley wheezed, red-faced and gasping.

Sam had protested that he was from New York and shouldn't be expected to know that Dixie shit, which only made Riley laugh. He must've been dragged out to every produce stand and farmers' market in the state before they'd gotten sent to Kirkland, New Mexico for the next forty-two weeks of their pararescue training and certification. Riley kept saying that everything was better in Louisiana, but since PJs didn't get stationed out there they might as well put in for Florida or Georgia when they got through the pipeline.

They'd ended up at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio instead, the only two pararescuemen from their class to be selected as candidates for the EXO-7 'Falcon' project. Then it was a year and a half of training and additional testing before they deployed to Iraq with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron out of Fort Bragg in 2009. Ten months after returning stateside they were back downrange again, this time in Afghanistan attached to the 58th Rescue Squadron from Nellis Air Force Base, for a shorter tour that ended early in 2011.

“Hey, Wilson, are you. . .” Riley had started to ask, but then paused and seemed to reconsider. Sam propped himself up on one elbow where he was lying on the ground, his wingpack and harness unhooked beside him, close at hand in case they needed to leave in a hurry. It was dark and a little overcast that night, so Sam didn't even have the benefit of moonlight to help him read the complex emotions flickering over Riley's face as his wingman stared up at the sky. He tucked his arm under his head and sighed.

“What?”

“Are you gonna —” Riley stopped again, tensed his jaw for a moment and then swallowed hard and nodded to himself, like he was pushing down an internal debate about whether or not he should even be asking. “Are you gonna stay in the Air Force forever?”

“Forever's a long time,” Sam said instead of answering. Riley wouldn't look at him.

“I don't know I wanna stay in, you know? But I don't think I could live with knowing that you were gonna go somewhere without me, 'cause. . . 'cause what if you needed me, man? What if you needed me and I wasn't there?”

Sam squeezes his eyes shut, takes a deep breath, and tries to calm his racing heart. Sometimes it does that, now. Runs ragged in his chest for no good reason, pounding behind his ribs until everything feels tight with anxiety. His skin will feel cold and all his insides too hot.

In the end, Riley's question hadn't mattered because Sam had been offered a medical discharge when they returned from their last tour. He jumped at the chance to get back to New York and the apartment he'd been illegally subletting in Harlem for years, and he couldn't just up and leave Riley, so here they were now.

“Hey, man,” he says, resting his forehead on the door, hand on the door jamb. “You gonna come out tonight?”

Riley doesn't say anything. Sam sighs. He was expecting as much.

“All right. Well, you just. . . Whenever you're ready,” Sam says, and the next words catch in his throat. He can feel his eyes start to water, his voice wavering when he does finally manage to speak. “I'm here, okay? I'm right here, Riley, whatever you need.”

They do this a lot, these days. Have this same exchange through the closed door, with Sam trying and trying and trying not to let it get to him. He misses Riley _so much_. It feels like he's dying some days, like he's bleeding out slow and in too much shock to tie off his own tourniquet. Like he's coming in too hard, too fast, about to botch the landing and all he can do is watch the ground rush up to meet him.

Like he's already fallen and he's just waiting for someone to scrape him off the dropzone.

He wishes Riley would just talk to him again. The therapist he'd seen while he was at the WTU last year used to talk about the importance of communication, about allowing himself to grieve and about accepting that sometimes he just needs to take a knee.

“You don't have to always be the strong one, Sam,” the therapist had said. That line was used a lot in therapy. So was, “It's okay to ask for help when you need it.”

Sam doesn't need help.

He just. . .

He needs —

“Riley?”


	2. Chapter 2

When he can, Sam forces himself to keep active, to leave the apartment, to take out the garbage and get the groceries. He gets orange juice and biscuits, little tomatoes that he can fry in the hopes that the smell will get Riley to come out of his room one of these mornings. Sam spends fifteen minutes in the produce section, staring at sweet potatoes and trying to remember what makes them different from yams. He picks up winter squash and green beans instead, gets good at making casseroles and country side dishes.

“I'mma teach you how to make cobbler and pecan tassies next,” Riley told him from where he was pulling a parchment-lined cookie sheet with bacon on it out of the oven in the off-base housing that they technically weren't authorized to have and could barely afford back in 2006. Most of the things Riley liked to cook required bacon, crumbled over the top or wrapped around the main ingredients. He liked dishes with an obscene amount of butter and cheese, too. Heavy, warm, gooey things that could make Sam moan while eating and feel guilty, like he needed to immediately run a 5K to make up for it.

“What the hell is a 'tassie?'” Sam asked, plucking a piece of bacon off the parchment paper and burning his fingers in the process. Riley tried to swat at him with an oven mitt, but Sam scurried back over to the safety of the table, blowing on his singed fingers and the hot bacon as he nibbled. He hadn't known about baking bacon or what parchment paper was even used for before they started living together. Now he wasn't sure if he'd ever bother pan-frying it again.

“Delicious, that's what,” Riley hissed with a grimace, as though Sam's culinary incompetence was blasphemous and caused him real pain. “Oh! An' I got a recipe for banana pudding and cherry yum-yums in that book, too. You'll be such a catch when I'm done with you, Wilson. Gonna make you somebody's fine-ass husband one of these days.”

“I'm already a catch, and I definitely don't need your help with my fine ass,” Sam laughed.

“They just gonna love you for your body, man,” Riley said, complaining with that particular brand of bitchy whining he had perfected over the years. “An' that shit's not forever. A good meal, though? That's happiness on a plate. We're cookin' up love in this kitchen.”

Sam stalls out by the dairy products for almost ten minutes, staring at a carton of eggs and thinking about Riley, fresh out of the shower in their barracks room when they were at Fort Benning for Airborne School earlier that same year, in yoga pants and a cut-up gym shirt, making breakfast on a hot plate they weren't supposed to have and humming along with some awful country song on the radio. They'd just completed a night equipment jump and Sam was bruised and tired from a shit landing, but he still stood in the doorway leading to the bathroom for a few extra minutes to watch instead of getting himself cleaned up. Riley was young and stupid handsome and his ass looked great and all Sam could think about was how much he would have liked to pull Riley into the shower with him.

"Get in there, Wilson," Riley had chided, shooting Sam a grin over his shoulder. He was starting to shuffle along with the music and Sam had to snap his eyes back up to Riley's face before he got caught watching him bounce around down there. "You _reek_. Go on, _get_. I promise I'll make enough for you, too; you don't gotta watch me like a hawk."

When he can, Sam goes to his group therapy meetings and pretends that they help. He listens to people talk about checking for bombs while driving on I-87, about feeling anxious on crowded sidewalks, about reaching for weapons that they no longer carry. He thinks about Riley and how he's got it so much worse, how the door stays closed and how much he misses his wingman. Sam doesn't have a problem with traffic or the trash on the side of the road. He doesn't flashback to firefights and ambushes when he hears a car backfire, doesn't stay up late at night to dwell on the last tour and all the things that he maybe should have done instead.

He does laundry at the washers down on 106th Street, and sometimes Riley's things are mixed up with his, and that's when it hits him.

“Holy shit, I'm gonna die a virgin,” Riley gasped over the comm. Sam could see him laying flat on his belly behind a pile of rubble, one leg cocked up and the other straight out behind him, from his own position, crouching with his shoulder pressed to the broken concrete wall he'd been stuck using as cover for the last six minutes. Most firefights didn't last more than fifteen minutes, because no one gave a shit about conserving ammunition and this wasn't the goddamn movies, but fifteen minutes went by awful slow when it was this hot and there were bullets and screams ripping through the air. Riley's rifle was supported on the rocks and he was trying to keep his head down because he didn't trust his flight helmet to stop a round.

“Riley, you stupid motherfucker!” Sam yelled, popping around the jagged side of the wall to return fire. The enemy, four or five of them, he thought, had good defensive positions in the bombed out shell of what had once been the lobby of an apartment building across the narrow street. It was late 2009 and they had no backup, no planned resupply, and nobody higher up listening in on their frequency. Officially, Sam and Riley weren't even in this country.

“Wilson, I'm gonna die a virgin and someone's gonna have to identify my fuckin' body. I'm wearin' women's underwear right now. How is the Air Force gonna explain that to my mama?!”

“Goddamnit, Riley, we're not dying today!” Sam yanked the pin off a grenade, thumbed the spoon and held it to his chest as he started his count. _One, two, three_ , and lobbed it hard over the wall towards the enemy. _Four, five, six_ went the count in the air. He didn't hear it hit the ground, but there was a boom when it went off, two different voices screaming in Khowar as the enemy hunkered down behind their own cover to avoid the explosion. “I got you covered, move move _move_!”

Riley rolled out from behind his position, scrambled up to his knees and ran for Sam. His boots slipped on the rocks and debris and Riley went down, slamming into the open space between where he'd been and where he'd been headed. He landed on his elbow and kneepads at first and quickly flattened out on his belly to start the quick low-crawl to get to Sam. The EXO-7 on his back made a big target, and all Sam could do was provide suppressive fire.

“I'm down!” Riley yelled, and Sam could hear him even without the comm in his ear. “Fuck, man, cover me while I move!”

He has to remind himself that that was three years ago and he didn't let Riley die that day. Sam takes a deep breath, tries to calm himself, slow his heart rate. He looks down at the clothes in his laundry bag, an Acadiana Roller Girls t-shirt and a pair of little black panties that aren't his sitting on top. He remembers teasing Riley about wearing them before he knew how much it meant to him, about wearing all his girlie clothes whenever they were stateside and off-post. At the derby track in Lafayette while on leave, in a drag bar in Greensboro one weekend when they were still stationed with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron.

“You ever gonna ask?” Riley said, leaning back against the bar. He had a day and a half's worth of stubble and red lipstick on. Black mascara and dark eyeshadow. Sam just smiled, and looked over the sequined top, the girlie jeans with useless front pockets and rhinestones on the ass, the bracelets that glittered in the bar's dim light. He took a drink of his rum and coke and shrugged.

“Nah, man,” he had replied. It was early 2010 and Don't Ask, Don't Tell had been repealed but it wasn't going into effect until later that year. It was still a closeted Air Force until September and they'd spent the last six years ignoring this thing, whatever it was. Sam had had two girlfriends since they'd left Lackland, and Riley didn't date or do hookups, ever. Usually he played wingman and designated driver whenever they went out. “You do you. It's not hurting anybody.”

“I don't think I'm gay,” Riley told him. Sam frowned. He didn't care. He'd been out as a bisexual back in high school, before going to college and then joining the Air Force. Sam wasn't out anymore, and his friends back home were good about listing him as an 'ally' instead of a member of the community now. It was a lie, but it was an easy lie because serving meant something, means something still, and it was worth keeping his mouth shut about hot guys and limiting his dating pool.

“Riley, I don't care, either way.”

“But I. . .” Riley looked down, unable to meet Sam's gaze. “I think about you, man. Like that. Sometimes. An' I'm sorry.”

Sam swallowed hard, feeling suddenly too warm. “What if I don't want you to be sorry?”

“You date girls,” Riley noted. Sam nodded.

“I do.” He paused, then admitted, “But I've dated guys, too.”

“What if I'm not either?” Riley asked. “There are times I don't know what I am, or I know I'm not one or the other.”

“I don't care,” Sam told him, and reached out for Riley's waist, pulling him closer. “Gay, bi, whatever. Whatever I have to be to be in love you, I'm it, okay?”

Sam reaches into the bag and pulls the shirt out with trembling hands, clutches it to his chest and can't stop his eyes from watering. The word he had needed then was 'pansexual.' The word Riley had been looking for was 'genderfluid.' He knows that now, but he can't be sure that Riley's heard him talk about that through the door, doesn't know if Riley's even listening anymore or if things like labels and belonging to a community matter at this point.

Back then, it seemed like being queer and in the military took up so much of their time with worry and vigilance and fear that they wouldn't pass as straight or cis or man enough, that someone would find out and they'd have to leave the service in shame. It used to be such a big part of their identities and now it's just a footnote, because they've got bigger things to worry about: Riley keeps his door closed and Sam has quiet breakdowns in between the aisles of the bodega where he does his grocery shopping or standing in front of the washers with his dirty laundry at his feet.

Sam would say that the worst part is that nobody notices, nobody knows or pauses or cares, because this is New York City and everybody's got their own shit to deal with it, but he'd be lying. The worst part is knowing that there isn't anything he can do to make their transition easier on Riley, that he can't take whatever is keeping Riley away from him. It's probably heavy but Sam could carry it, if Riley needed him to, because. . .

Because he's strong. He's always been strong, even when he doesn't have to be, even when they tell him to take a knee or a breather or to rest and recover. Sam's only gotten stronger over the years; he was strong in Harlem before the Air Force and then he was strong in training strapped into his wing harness and strong when they sent him overseas.

He doesn't always get why it's so damn hard now, when he's safe and home in New York, to have that kind of strength again.

Sam stuffs his clothes in the wash and pays, sits in one of the little plastic chairs off to the side and waits for the cycle to finish. He's got Riley's shirt in his hands still. It isn't even dirty.


	3. Chapter 3

A week goes by. Sam's mom calls him every few days to make sure he's doing all right and adjusting to being a civilian again. She asks him what he's up to, how things are going. Sam keeps his answers vague; 'yes, mom, I'm okay' and 'not up to much, just getting by, keeping busy. You know how it is.' She reminds him that he can stop by anytime; both of Sam's parents are still alive and well, living in the same row house in Sugar Hill that they've had for more than twenty years, and it wouldn't kill him to visit sometime.

Riley's mama doesn't ever call. Sam doesn't think Riley's heard from his folks since before their last deployment. He hasn't ever spoken to them before, because Riley said they were Southern Baptists and was pretty damn sure they didn't want to meet his new black boyfriend.

“My dad'll tell me to forget their number,” Riley told him when Sam pressed him on the matter. It was December 2010, and they were shipping out in two days to spend at least six months in Afghanistan before the summer fighting season kicked off. Their orders had them stationed out of Bagram, but they both knew that was just what the papers said. The EXO-7 deployments were mission-based, and they'd come home when the Brass decided they'd flown enough rescues and extractions and not a moment sooner. “And my mama won't send us any of those nice care packages no more.”

It was only their second tour as Falcons; their first was 203 days in Iraq and they'd only been in reset and retraining since March. That was what happened when the military only had two working wingpacks and two trained PJs to wear them. They were supposed to be expanding the project but funding was becoming an issue and the last Sam had heard their replacement operators had been medically disqualified.

“You're their son,” Sam had said, as though that's all that should matter. His own parents didn't care who he dated, they were just happy that he was happy, so long as he was safe and loved. Sam's father was a preacher and his mother taught sixth graders at a public middle school. Riley said his dad used to be Army, and that he'd been born at Fort Hamilton and then grown up in Louisiana because they were stationed at Fort Polk when his old man finally retired. Somehow he never mentioned rank or branch in all the years they'd known each other and Sam didn't know what Riley's mama did other than cook.

Riley had smiled, a little tight at the edges, and didn't say anything to that.

Sam's father calls him every Sunday like clockwork since moved back to New York to ask why he didn't make it to the service, tells him that he holds it at the same time as he's always held it and that Sam should make an effort to show up. That a little gospel is good for the soul, even if he doesn't pay much attention to the sermon that day. Sam smiles and nods along, but his eyes are on Riley's closed door.

“You'll spend Easter with us, won't you?” his father asks, voice crackling on the line. It's the beginning of February now, and he's been back in Harlem for nearly two months. Sam hadn't spent last Christmas with his family; he'd spent it sitting on the floor with his head in his hands, back pressed to that closed door, crying and begging Riley to open it and let him in. He'd been in lockdown at the WTU for Thanksgiving before they'd released him from the service, and last Easter and the previous Christmas he'd been overseas.

It's long past due for him to spend a holiday with his parents. Sam knows he should promise his father that he'll be there, but he thinks it might be worse to break the promise than to not make it at all.

“I think it depends. I might not be able to,” Sam says noncommittally. His father sighs.

He wants to explain that sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's hard. Sometimes Sam looks up from the TV and realizes that he can't remember when he last ate, that his eyes hurt and his head is throbbing because he's dehydrated. When that happens, he counts it as a success if he manages to brush his teeth, pour himself a glass of water, and go to bed so he can deal with everything in the morning.

Some days he feels like he's in free fall, like his hands don't quite work and he can't reach his ripcord, and he'll just stare at Riley's door until the wind dies down. Until the heat fades from his skin and the sand is brushed from his clothes. Until he doesn't need his parachute anymore.

Until the ground rushes up to meet him and he hits the DZ too hard and his knees buckle.

He wants to explain all that, but he doesn't know how, so he just listens to his father sigh and hears the disappointment the man won't put into words.

“Well,” his father says. “When you're ready, you know where to find us.”

Sam goes jogging, goes to his group therapy meetings, brings the mail up from the boxes in the lobby downstairs. Riley's mail piles up on the kitchen table until Sam just sweeps the stacks into the trash.

He finds himself loitering in the bread aisle the next time he goes shopping. Riley liked white bread, which used to make Sam snicker about stereotypes but now just makes his guts twist and roil. They used to joke about Sam picking up white bread for his white bred, used to argue about the nutritional value or lack thereof; Sam used to groan about a loaf not being worth the dollar if it was just sugar and starch, empty calories they didn't need when they had to keep to a certain weight for the EXO-7s they wore. Riley would whine and bitch until Sam relented, and then he'd make french toast the morning after every grocery run and tell Sam what a great guy he was.

“If I gain weight,” Sam would warn every time as he poured more syrup over his breakfast. “You are recalibrating my wingpack.”

Riley doesn't make french toast anymore. Sam got white bread last time and had to eat the whole loaf by himself. He doesn't know if he can stand doing that again this week. Sighing, he looks down the aisle and debates the risk of getting wheat or one of those fancy kinds with six different types of oats and nuts in it. Riley couldn't stand those, and maybe it would be enough to pull him into a confrontation. They haven't yelled at each other since Afghanistan, and while Sam doesn't want a fight he'll take what he can get these days. They used to fight all the time.

“I can't fuckin' believe you're giving me a negative counseling statement for this shit,” Riley snarled, stomping into the borrowed office on the unfamiliar air base. Sam closed the door quickly, hoping to block in the sound of whatever fight they're about to have. It was their LT's office, borrowed on account of Sam not having his own. As a team leader with only one airman under him, Sam had never needed to have an office before, some place out of sight to dole out punishments and counseling statements.

“Shut up, Riley.”

“He deserved it, an' I ain't sorry,” Riley retorted. Sam gaped at him.

“Are you kidding? I don't care if he deserved it, Riley, you're a _Senior fucking Airman_ and you ought to hold yourself to a higher standard —”

“Higher standard?” he interrupted, scoffing. “ _Fuck_ your 'higher standard,' Wilson! Did you _hear_ what he _said to me_? You oughta have my back on this!” 

“ _I can't_!” Sam screamed at him, lurching forward to grab Riley by both arms and shake him. “I'm your first-line supervisor. The LT is already asking me shit about you, about _us,_ you idiot! Everybody _knows_ we're close, Riley, and if they find out _how close_ , then one of us is getting transferred off the goddamn team, okay? So, I can't, all right? I can't have your back and protect your career at the same time.”

“. . . My _career?_ ” Riley repeated, his face twisting into an expression of shocked rage. He planted both hands on Sam's chest and shoved him back roughly. Sam stumbled and caught himself on the LT's desk. “Don't feed me that shit, man, I ain't stupid. _My_ career is not the one at stake, and we both know it. _You're_ the team leader, remember? I'm your _subordinate_.”

“Oh no,” Sam said, putting up a hand to wave off the accusation. “You don't get to play this off like that. I didn't take advantage of you; you came onto _me_ in that bar. You knew exactly what we were doing and what we were going to have to do to stay in this together. So don't you put this on me like —”

“Like what? Like maybe sometimes I need you to be my boyfriend and not my NCO?” Riley snapped. Sam grabbed at him again, and they struggled, twisting and pulling at each other's uniform, feet slipping and repositioning until he slammed Riley up against the wall, chest pressing into chest and his hands fisted in Riley's collar.

“You listen to me, you _asshole_ ,” Sam bit out through clenched teeth, leaning in so close that their noses bumped. “I'm gonna write you up and suggest to the LT that he put you on extra duty for a week and give you a reprimand, and then I'm gonna get down on my fucking knees and beg the Commander not to court-martial you, and to suspend your reduction until this tour is up, because _I love you_ and I'm not above sacrificing my pride to keep you on this team when you rough up people we can't afford to piss off. You don't want me to be your NCO? You don't want me to have your back next time we go up in the air? Who do you want up there with you more than me, huh? You say the fucking word, Riley, and I swear to God, I'll put in for a transfer right now. I'll be your boyfriend from Kadena or goddamn Lakenheath while you're flyin' an' fryin' here in Bagram.”

“That's not. . .” Riley furrowed his brow, scowling. “That's not what I want. I just. . . Damnit, Wilson, I just wish you had my back down here on the ground, too.”

Sam kissed him, hard and quick so they wouldn't get caught, and whispered, “I got you, baby. I always got you, okay? Just trust me on this. You trust me?”

“You know I do,” Riley had said, and everything wasn't okay but _they_ were okay and that was really all that mattered to Sam.

Riley didn't get that second Article 15, though he certainly deserved it. The whole incident had been swept up under the rug, a perk of being on a special team during a deployment when no one wanted to waste time and resources putting together a court-martial. That tour had been cut short, anyway. Sam takes a deep breath, runs a hand over his face and shakes his head, trying to force himself back into the present. It's just bread, he tells himself. It's not that big a deal. Sam grabs a loaf at random and tosses it into the cart before heading for the cashier.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I based Gideon's description off a cross of Anthony Mackie's real brother (Calvin Mackie) and the 616-version of the character from the comics. Also, in the military, we call someone who is not a team player a 'buddy fucker' or (in sneaky Army code) a 'blue falcon.' The joke Riley is making is a terrible pun.

It's Sam's older brother who stops by first, knocks on the apartment door and refuses to leave even though it takes Sam nearly twenty minutes to haul himself out of bed and into a pair of sweats. He pulls yesterday's shirt back on and opens the front door to reveal Gideon's judging frown and Sam can feel his whole body tense up in preparation for whatever bullshit is about to go down. Gideon has a cup of coffee in each gloved hand, the collar of his jacket pulled up to keep the wind off his neck and a slouchy black beanie to cover up his skull. It must be cold outside.

Gideon and Sam don't much look alike, despite being brothers. They've got the same dark eyes and black hair, when Gideon lets his grow out, but his older brother is a lighter shade of brown, cool yellow undertones that make him look so much paler than Sam ever does. His head is shaved bald right now, no fuss, and Sam's pretty sure that Gideon does it himself instead of visiting the local barber shop their father used to take them to. They've both got that pointed Wilson jaw, a little under-defined at the chin, and Gideon's got thicker brows and a flatter nose. He's broader across the shoulders than Sam, too, a bit heavier set now that he’s no longer playing defensive end for their high school football team, but he still comes across looking like a mean cuss that shouldn’t be bumped in the subway. Sam has to look up just a bit because Gideon has had about three inches on him his whole life.

“It's ten o'clock in the morning,” Gideon says, instead of saying hello. Sam reminds himself that it would be rude to slam the door shut in his brother's face, and steps out of the way to let him in. Gideon brushes past him in the narrow entryway on his way into the apartment, heading for the couch in the living room because Sam's kitchen is only about four feet across in the back and there certainly isn't room for a table in there unless he drops it in the opening from the hallway, right smack in front of the oven and the sink. Sam follows after him at a slower pace, reciting the pararescue creed to himself like a calming mantra. A few days ago someone in group therapy mentioned it was helpful in keeping them grounded in the present when they felt like getting lost in their thoughts, and Sam's starting to admit that he could use the help.

_It is my duty as a pararescueman to save life and to aid the injured._

“What are you doing today?” Gideon asks, placing one of the cups of coffee down on the table in front of Sam. Sam stares at it for a moment, then glances back to Riley's closed door. _I will be prepared at all times to perform my assigned duties quickly and efficiently_. He shrugs and picks up the coffee. Gideon nods like he expected as much. “Have you thought about getting a job? Your savings aren't going to last forever, and unless you want to move back in with Mom and Dad —“

“Is that why you're here?” Sam interrupts. Gideon rolls his eyes. There's ten years between them and too much history from when Sam was younger and they were both still figuring themselves out for this to just be because his brother is worried about his future. Gideon wasn't a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination, but he was staunchly anti-military and there'd been a lot of angry backroom conversations when Sam left New York to join the Air Force. Gideon's a preacher now, like their father, with a grown son and a buried wife.

“I'm here because Sarah called you seven times yesterday and you wouldn't answer your phone. Is your phone still on? Did you pay your bill?”

“'Deon,” Sam says, perhaps a little too harshly. “I'm thirty-three, not thirteen. I don't need you to come over and —“

“You need somethin',” Gideon says, huffing a deep breath. He takes a long drink from his coffee. “You need to _do_ something. Look, I'm. . . I'm not going to pretend that I know what you're going through.”

Sam closes his eyes, trying to focus on the next part of the creed while Gideon keeps talking. _To perform my assigned duties quickly and efficiently, placing these duties before personal desires and comforts_.He thinks maybe he should have picked a different mantra for today.

“But I did this, you know? I've already done this thing where, after the fact, I shut everybody out and pretended that I was making progress when I was really just spinning my wheels. You can't just stay here, Sam. You've got to move forward.”

_These things I do, that others may live._

“You think I don't know that?” Sam asks, and he almost laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. Of course he knows that. The way he's living now isn't sustainable, but he can't imagine how he's going to hold down a job right now when he can't even keep track of what day of the week it is. The people at his group therapy meetings keep saying this is normal, that adjustment takes time, that separating from the service isn't like just leaving the workforce. It's losing a way of life, losing a community and a family and a set of values and there's just so much gone that Sam doesn't know how he's supposed to be able to function without it.

It would be so much easier, he thinks, with Riley beside him.

“When Aaliyah died,” Gideon says gravely, and Sam looks up because his brother doesn't ever talk about the wife he lost to breast cancer when Sam was still in college. “You came over to my apartment every single day.”

 _It is my duty to save life and aid the injured_.

“You had a toddler,” Sam says blankly, remembering how small his nephew had been back then. He's not sure where this conversation is going anymore; it's not exactly a similar situation.

“And you made sure that nothing bad happened to Jim while I was out of my mind,” Gideon finishes for him. Sam frowns. That's not how he remembers it. He doesn't remember Gideon acting crazy or even being angry. Mostly he remembers helping his parents get Jim dressed in the mornings and take his baths in the evenings. They brought food over and made sure everyone ate at least once that day. Their sister Sarah had still been in high school then, but the two of them would come over after classes and play with Jim in his room. Gideon spent a lot of time with their father, talking about faith and trying not to lose his. “Sam, we might not always like each other, but we're family. And family takes care of its own.”

Gideon puts a hand on Sam's shoulder and gives it a squeeze. Sam drinks his coffee and refocuses his attention on the coffee table. He had left last night's dishes out here and the remains of his dinner are crusted to the plate now in a gross, congealed mess. It probably smells, too, but Sam's too used to it to notice.

Sam's enough of an adult to acknowledge that, objectively speaking, he's a little bit of a shit show at the moment.

“Hey,” Gideon says. “Talk to me.”

“Thanks,” Sam says thickly. “For coming over today.” Gideon snorts.

“I didn't really want to be alone, either. The first one is always the hardest.”

It hits Sam then that it's Valentine's Day. That the reason Gideon didn't want him to be alone today, of all days, was because of the holiday. He'd knocked on Riley's door that morning to ask if Riley needed anything, but there wasn't any reply. Gideon probably didn't much like this holiday anymore, now that he was a widower, but Sam isn't, he didn't —

“How come we gotta have such stupid call signs, anyway?” Riley had asked, nudging the chocolate spread from his MRE closer to Sam's leg. Sam looked down at it, then up at Riley's stupid hopeful smile, like maybe he thought that Sam wasn't going to accept presents while they were out on mission. He rolled his eyes but picked it up out of the dirt and brushed it off anyway. Sam tore open a corner and held it up to his mouth, gesturing with his free hand for Riley to continue complaining. “I mean, why we gotta use numbers? We could use primary colors, or somethin', man. Like, I could be 'Red Falcon,' how 'bout that? That'd be cool, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah.” Riley shook his head, chuckling a little before he raised his brows cheekily and added, “Yeah, and you can be blue.”

“Really, Riley?” Sam gaped for a moment, then punched Riley in the shoulder. “Really? _Blue Falcon?_ That's how it's gonna be?”

“Well, you're fuckin' your buddy, aintcha?” he asked, grinning. Riley rocked back from the hit, then leaned in close so that their shoulders pressed together. It was about as close to cuddling as they could get, sitting side by side on the rocks with all their gear and body armor on.

Sam snorted, and finished eating. “Not tonight I'm not.”

“Aw, Wilson, don't be like that,” Riley whined. “I gave you chocolate. An' brought you out to a secluded, romantic position in overwatch —“

“I don't think Kandahar is all that romantic, frankly,” Sam admitted, squinting at the dull grey and tan ridge line. The sun was coming up and his flight goggles were pushed up onto his helmet, and he'd need to switch out the clear lenses with his shaded ones before they headed out.

“— with nobody even shootin' at us. This is about as classy as Afghanistan is gonna get on short notice,” Riley said. “Though I guess we could shoot off a star cluster, or something. Mood lighting. Hell, I'm feeling so romantic, I'd let you do it to Marvin Gaye or whoever you felt like.”

“I'm gonna fuck you to Four Tops when we get back, just to be obnoxious,” Sam warned, but he was smiling when he said it. Riley laughed, and Sam thought he looked beautiful, sitting there in the dust and the sand with the day's first light on his dirty face where he was still peeling a little from a sunburn. His own goggles were hanging around his neck so Sam could see the brightness of his hazel eyes, the way he was happy to be out here in the shit as long as they were out in it together. Sam nudged him with his shoulder. “Hey. I love you.”

Riley kissed him at the corner of his mouth, soft and sweet, and murmured, “Happy Valentine's Day.”

Sam sucks in a shaky, uneven breath. Gideon is still holding onto him, still sitting next to him on the couch. It isn't 2011 anymore and Sam's pretty sure that Riley isn't going to come out today. _I will. . . I will be prepared at all times_ , he thinks desperately, clinging to the creed because Gideon's right and damnit, Sam needs _something_ so why not this?

“I. . .” he starts, but his voice sounds all wrong, sounds choked up and strained and like he's struggling not to lose it. His eyes feel all scratchy and dry, like there's fine desert sand scraping against his corneas. Gideon waits for him to swallow it all down, to compose himself. He even takes the cup from Sam's shaking hands and puts it down on the coffee table before Sam spills it all over his lap. Maybe spending the last seven years apart has done them some good, put some of those misunderstandings to rest. Gideon won't ever be his confidant, per se, but that doesn't mean Sam can't accept his familial concern. “Y-yeah. I guess I could use the company.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be advised that I am very serious about my PTSD tag, and this chapter deals with both Sam's war memories and his father's from Vietnam. Also a racial slur (the N word) is used in this chapter. No fancast for this chapter, as the description of Sam's father comes from a cross between the older Falcon comics and some Vietnam vets I know.

Sam's father shows up later that week to sit with Sam in his living room, wanting to talk about Sam's service, about his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, about war in general and how it changes people. His father is a preacher now, but he wasn't always and he tells Sam as much.

Sam knows that his father was drafted for Vietnam, served overseas and saw a lot of awful shit over there before coming home to angry shouts and civilian protesters. He doesn't know what that's like. The War on Terror isn't popular but it wasn't like Vietnam in the '70s. Sam's never been spit on or called a baby killer.

An instructor called him a nigger once in 2008, back when he and Riley were still testing the EXO-7s for the field. They were just about to go into lockdown at the installation hospital for their medical screening and immunizations, and Sam had been sitting on his A-bag next to the smoking area outside their barracks, talking with one of the program's wash-outs who would be shipping back to his old unit in the morning. Riley was cleaning his garrison boots next to him, trying to brush the synthetic suede back down now that he'd finally gotten the dirt scrubbed out.

"Airman Wilson, come here," the instructor had called from the steps of the barracks, and Sam had looked up but hadn't gotten to his feet fast enough and then the instructor was shouting, "Nigger, I said get your ass over here!"

Sam's blood had gone cold and his face had felt hot as he paused, mid-rise, hands clenched convulsively at his sides. He was almost thirty and no one had ever called him that before; it felt humiliating and demeaning, and he knew that there wasn't anything he could do about it. They'd started out with twenty candidates in the program and that number had already dwindled to twelve. Sam was one of only four black men who had made it to the medical phase, and goddamn it, he wanted to be a Falcon and had been through too much to fuck it up getting hot-headed. He had let the Air Force drown him and starve him in training already, had collapsed his parachute on order and then trekked eight miles on a sprained ankle back to the rally point. If he had to let an instructor call him a nigger to graduate then that was just what he had to do.

For a moment, everything felt impossibly still, the slur hanging heavy in the sudden quiet. Then Riley dropped his boots and lurched to his feet, crossed that fifteen meter gap like lightning to slam the instructor into the concrete. By the time Sam and the other airman pulled Riley off, the instructor had a black eye, a broken nose, and a dislocated jaw.

The MPs had shown up and taken Riley back to the station to spend the evening in their detainment cell, but the Brass in charge of the EXO-7 project must have thought it would cost too much to replace him because Riley didn't get pulled from the program right then and there. He got released in the morning to go through the medical screening and get all those weird shots, and a week after the lockdown was over, Sam and Riley were the only PJs left standing.

Riley got his first Article 15, but it could have gone a lot worse if they hadn't been the only Falcons in the Air Force. Sam had known a guy at Lackland who got dishonorably discharged following an Article 91, and by all rights, they could have court-martialed Riley. Instead, Riley just got knocked back down to Airman 1st Class, got his post privileges revoked and was slapped with some extra duty and a General Letter of Reprimand in his permanent file. The instructor got transferred to another post out of state and Sam never saw him again. In seven years of service that was the only time something like that had ever happened.

He doesn't know how to tell his father any of that, though, so he doesn't say anything. There isn't a gentle way to point out that the Air Force Sam served in is so vastly removed from his father's Army experiences that the things his father shares are just stories now. That Sam listens with a vague, unconnected feeling because they all sound like they're set in that hazy time period that swirls around legends and folktales, lost and unreal.

"You dream about bein' back there, Sammy?" his father asks, hands folded in his lap and his eyes a little distant. He looks old, Sam realizes with a start. His father is all narrow chest and tall leanness, skin darker than his own and starting to sag, deep lines carved into his face from time and laughter and too much frowning. His hair is grayer than it was last time Sam saw him, he thinks, more salt than pepper at this point, and his hairline is receding sharply. "That's normal, you know. You'll probably always dream about it and the things you seen out there."

Sam doesn't answer, and his father keeps talking, keeping his voice low because it's still hard for him to talk about it, even after all this time. His father talks about dreaming of the jungle and rice paddies, about long recon patrols on old dirt roads in a country with nothing but heat and sweat and fear for miles and miles until mortars start dropping and bullets start flying.

He talks about loss and the way death smells, about struggling to be a good man in an evil place. About how the mind tries to find ways around all the bad things, tries to bury it or cover it up, twist or change the grisly truth into something more manageable. His father's RTO had taken a bullet through the back during one patrol, ripped right through the platoon's big ol' Harris radio. The passage of the metal had sucked all the wires out of the box and through the soldier's chest, poking through the skin and his uniform like something out of a science fiction film. All the blood he saw that day was so dark and thick that it seemed like oil, and his father said that for a long time after that nothing in Vietnam looked human to him. He'd dreamt of robots and androids on the battlefield for the whole rest of the tour, and while maybe that had made it easier to deal with then it certainly didn't help him sleep at night now.

"It's called 'compartmentalization' these days," his father says after a pause. "Your mind does what it has to to get you through it, and then you deal with it in your own time, God willing."

Sam nods and looks down at the carpet beneath his feet. It's like his group sessions: everybody he knows who deployed and came back is reliving all these horrors. But Sam doesn't have nightmares about the war and the shit they saw or the awful things they had to do to get the mission accomplished. Sam pulled men out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip-tied and concussed for the flight back, while Riley pointed his rifle at their wives and kids and parents where they trembled and cried on dirt floors. Sometimes they were told who they were extracting and what they'd allegedly done during the mission brief. Sometimes they just got a picture and an eight-digit grid coordinate.

He thinks there must be something wrong with him, that he's not dealing with this the normal way like everybody else. Sam wonders what it means that he doesn't have nightmares about the kids wearing bomb vests who got sent up to the checkpoints to get shot by Americans or blown up by the trigger men, isn't haunted by the people Riley slammed in the face with the butt of his rifle when they tried to pull Sam away from their adult sons, all of them shouting in languages the other couldn't understand.

No, Sam doesn't dream about any of that.

He dreams about Riley, and the pissed off look he got when Sam told him they'd come down on orders for that first tour in Iraq.

"That's not a funny joke," Riley had said. "Do they know how low we fly?"

"You mean," Sam sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. "Does the Brass in charge of the top secret Falcon project know the range and limitations of our incredibly expensive wingpacks that they've had to approve? Yeah, Riley, I think they've been briefed at some point."

"Well, we fly below fifteen thousand feet, and you want to know what else has a range that low, Wilson?" Riley snapped. "Anti-fucking-aircraft, that's what. Jesus _Christ_."

"You knew we would deploy at some point when you volunteered —" Sam began but Riley groaned over his words and covered his face with his hands.

"I thought someone would realize that flyin' around with no oxygen and minimal body armor in a goddamn warzone is a stupid idea!" he cried. "Like, sure it looks cool on a training slide and it'll be a great recruiting gimmick, but if we get hit with a surface-to-air missile from one of those Talibani manpads we're just gonna be a fuckin' _crimson smear_ , just red mist an' itty bitty pieces a' burnin' metal rainin' down, man, _shit!_ "

Sam always wakes up in a sweat afterwards, never quite staying asleep long enough to hear himself reassure Riley that he'd take care of him, the way he always had in training, and promise that they'd both come home at the end of the tour.

Or he'll dream about Riley pressing up against him in the shadows of a HESCO barrier on the perimeter of a British combat outpost they'd stopped at to resupply last April. They were both tired and jittery from their previous mission, out too late and without enough time to even make it back to Bagram before the Brass was redirecting them, sending them out into harm's way. It was night and Riley's mouth was hard, insistent, desperate like he'd known he was going to d—

Sam's heart stutters, pulse tripping. His breath catches and his skin prickles with sweat. He wipes his palms off on his pants and can't meet his father's eyes.

"Come on,” Riley had muttered, voice low and more breath than substance. He used to get grabby when the missions took too long, and Sam always had the feeling that there was something more to it than just adrenaline. Riley tugged at Sam's belt until it loosened, slipped a hand down the back of Sam's fatigues and squeezed his ass. Sam groaned into Riley's mouth, half-pleasure and half-exasperation. His wingpack was digging into the skin between his shoulder blades and his spine fucking ached from their last flight and he knew he was going to have to fight the unit here to get more ammo before they went back up and, goddamn it, they didn't have time for this shit right now. “ _C'mon_.”

“Riley,” he complained, smearing the whine across his wingman's lips. “Riley, quit it; I haven't seen running water in a damn week, I can fucking smell myself, I am _disgusting_ right now —“

“So? So, you think I care?” Riley growled back, biting at Sam's lower lip and then sucking on it for a moment. “You think I only want you when you're clean? I don't care. I don't — I like you anyway. Clean, dirty, it don't matter; I want you, I want you all the time, I just need —“

“We gotta _go_ ,” Sam reminded him. “Takeoff's in an hour.”

Riley shook his head and buried his face against Sam's neck. Sam grimaced. It felt like there was five days of sweat and dust on every visible inch of him, and it must have tasted nasty. That dust was gonna turn into mud in Riley's mouth. “I won't take an hour.”

“ _Riley_.”

“I don't even wanna go up there,” Riley had whispered into his skin, and Sam had just sighed like an asshole and rolled his eyes _because how could he have known?_ “Fuck this, Wilson. Fuck this mission.”

“Come on, it's a perfectly normal grab an' —“

“No, no, _no_ ,” Riley insisted, and kissed him again, rolling his hips against Sam's and tightening the grip he had on Sam's ass. “I don't give a _single shit_ how important Khalid Khandil might be; they can send some other fuckers out to get him.”

“That's not how it _works_ , you dumbass,” Sam snapped, pushing back until he could get Riley slammed up against the tan barriers. Both of Riley's hands came up to Sam's chest as Sam shook him by his EXO-7 harness. “We _go_ where we're _told_ , okay? We don't get to fuckin' pick and choose, _Jesus_ , Riley, _what the fuck?_ Get ahold of yourself, airman.”

“I know, I know, I — _shit,_ I _know_ , okay?” Riley had babbled, had leaned in to try to kiss Sam again and Sam just shoved him back against the barrier. His wingpack was probably leaving bruises between his shoulders, and Sam hadn't cared because he was tired and frustrated and they had to go soon and _he hadn't known_ , okay, _how the hell was he supposed to have known?_ “Promise me you'll be careful.”

“We have done this a hundred fucking times, Riley.”

“ _Promise me_ you're gonna make it back!” Riley begged, voice cracking and eyes wet. He had looked so scared and Sam hadn't understood at all.

“You are the stupidest man alive, Riley, I swear to God,” Sam had said, glaring. “Everything is going to be _fine_ , now _calm the fuck down_.”

“I love you,” Riley had said, choked up with emotion. “I can't go back without you, Wilson, I'm serious right now, if I lost you —“

“Shut up,” Sam hissed, shaking Riley by the straps again, bouncing the EXO-7 off the barrier before pinning him there with his weight. “You _shut the hell up,_ Riley. No one is losing anyone, it is a routine extraction.”

Riley squirmed and tried to kiss him again, but Sam put his forearm against Riley's collarbone to keep him from getting close enough. “Okay,” Riley had said, finally, breathing hard and still struggling to push down that earlier hysteria. “Okay, okay, I'm calm.”

“Are you?” Sam asked, bitter and pissed. “Because I can't take you up there if you're like this, baby. I can do it alone —“

“ _No_!” Riley screamed, and the panic was back and he was crying for real now, tears spilling down his cheeks. “No, don't you _dare_ , don't you fuckin' leave me here, you bastard, _don't you leave me behind!_ ”

Riley's voice from last year is still ringing in his ears when Sam asks, "Do you think I'm compartmentalizing?"

"I think when you bury something," his father says, slow and careful and controlled. "You keep coming back to it until you put it to rest."

He doesn't ever dream about Bakhmala.

"Move right," Riley had said into the comm roughly, and Sam had barely heard him over the static crackle and the sound of the rushing wind. Riley was edging in too close, not keeping the appropriate spacing for their flight formation, and he'd been doing it the whole damn way.

The EXO-7s were great for getting them in and out of an area quick, but there wasn't much they could carry given the careful calibrations for the wingpacks. They got three liters of water and a couple field-stripped MREs, but the majority of their weight limits were used up on their medical equipment and their weapons, on what felt like never enough ammo. Riley used to joke that they flew with quarterback pads instead of real body armor, and the missions that lasted more than a few days made them both woozy and strained more than just muscles and joints.

Sam shifted right and told Riley, "You're drifting."

"I got a bad feeling," Riley said, and Sam had just about had it with this bullshit today. Riley got bad feelings all the time when they did back-to-back missions, when they missed the stabilizer and altitude meds they'd been taking ever since the medical phase of training. "Like, buzzing around my skull and tinglin' all up and down my arms. I can feel it behind my eyes, man. It's bad."

Sam turned his head to tell Riley that it was just withdrawal, just nerves, nothing to be worried about. He got weird stuff, too, when they missed their meds; Sam got auditory hallucinations and mild delusions, thought he could talk to birds and all their chirping sounded like snippets of overheard conversations. Last time, he'd spent twenty minutes trading fly-over reports of an enemy encampment with a mountain finch. It was trippy as shit.

He turned his head look at Riley, and with the flight goggles down, it was hard to tell if they had made eye contact in the dark before they started their descent into the city. But Sam knew Riley's face, knew that familiar, tight line of his mouth and that particular grim furrow of his brows. He was looking right at Riley when the sky lit up with fire and smoke clawed down his throat, burning into his lungs.

It hits Sam then, sitting on the couch in his apartment with his father next to him, that he hasn't kissed Riley since that night, and that Riley's never going to kiss him again because Riley —

Sam lurches forward, sucking in a gasping breath and his father catches him before he falls to the floor. He's crying now and shaking and his father just pulls Sam into his arms, holds him like he used to when Sam was just a little boy.

"Shh, shh, Sammy, it's okay," his father says, but it's _not_ okay, it's _not okay_ because Riley is —

Riley is —

Oh god, _Riley is_ —

"No," he says, to his father and the memory and the heat of the explosion ghosting over his exposed skin. To the sting of burning ash and shrapnel and the awful reflex that pulled him up and out of the kill zone. To the dark form that he was powerless to keep from tumbling toward the ground. His throat closes around the words and he chokes out, "No, no, _no_. There's nothing left to bury."


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made changes to previous chapters (including replacing the old chapter four with a new one that introduces Gideon Wilson to the story and moving the scene with Sam's mom to the new chapter seven). There has been a lot of rearranging, so if you were reading this story when I was first uploading it you will need to start over, sorry! On the bright side, I think the story flows better now.

Sam gets trashed after his father finally leaves. The alcohol burns and he doesn't even bother cutting it with anything, because all he wants to do is just forget. Forget their talk tonight and the last few months of trying to adjust and the heavy taste of failure on his tongue. He wants to forget the last year and the WTU, the heat on his skin and the desert sand and the empty bedroom in his apartment. He isn't strong enough for this shit.

He ends up sitting on the floor with his back to Riley's door, the bottle by his hip, crying into his glass until he finally passes out.

Sam wakes up disoriented, his head pounding and his vision blurry. The room tilts and sways unsteadily and he kind of wants to throw up. He thinks the last time he was this hungover was 2007, and he’d just woken up in the passenger seat of Riley's shitty old truck with his back aching, staring at the side of the road and trying to figure out where the hell he was.

"Riley," Sam had groaned, squeezing his eyes shut again because oh god everything was _awful_. Everything was awful and it hurt and it was Wednesday morning and they were definitely not on post. He threw his arm out towards the driver's side and felt the back of his hand connect with Riley's chest where his wingman was slumped forward in his seat against the steering wheel. "Riley, what the hell?"

Riley jerked awake with an unintelligible noise, rubbing at his eyes and then scrubbing a hand over his whole face before grabbing the wheel. He looked around for a moment and then dropped his head back and swore, "Aw, fuck. _Fuck_. I didn't mean to sleep that long, we're gonna be late. _Shit_."

"Why were you sleeping at all?!" Sam dug his fingers into Riley's shirt, partly to steady himself and partly as a display of annoyance. Riley hadn't been drinking last night because he didn't drink, which left him responsible for getting them back on post so they could make it to PT on time. "Where the hell are we?"

Sam groped for the phone in his pocket to check the time. PT started in half an hour, and they were still in their party clothes. Riley’s makeup was smeared around his eyes and his lipstick was faded and smudged and he was wearing a tight pink tank top that definitely wasn’t bought in the men’s section. _Shit_.

"Hey, fuck you, Wilson," Riley snapped, fumbling with the truck keys. "You oughta be glad you didn't wake up in a damn _ditch_. I thought I was gonna pass out, so I pulled over, okay?"

Sam turned his head too quickly and felt vomit rise in his throat. He was going to throw up all over the inside of Riley's truck and it served that asshole right for taking Sam out on a damn work night. Sam took a deep breath in through his nose and swallowed hard. There were only three things they had to do to be good airmen — be in the right place, at the right time, and in the right uniform — and they were about to fuck up all of them.

"Riley, you dumb piece of shit," Sam said, and shoved his door open. He struggled for a moment with his seatbelt before he finally unbuckled it and stumbled out of the truck. Riley gaped at him as he made his way around the hood to the driver's door and Riley’s rolled down window. "Gimme the damn keys."

"Oh my god, are you still drunk?" Riley asked, his voice a horrified whisper, but was already unbuckling his own seatbelt when Sam wrenched the door open. He handed over the keys as ordered and scrambled over the center console into the passenger seat to get out of Sam's way.

"Where's your rescue bag?" Sam asked as he got in and started the truck up. He adjusted his seat and the rearview mirror.

"Aw, fuck," Riley said, and twisted in his seat to pull his medic supply pack out from the back of the cab. Sam held out his right arm expectantly, fingers curled into a fist, as he pulled back onto the road.

"Stick me," Sam barked.

Riley whined, "While you're driving, man?" Sam glared at him again and Riley bounced petulantly in his seat, a wordless noise of frustration and displeasure escaping him. But he dug out an IV and some saline from his bag, all the same. "We're not even gonna make it back in time, just call the sergeant, it'll be fi— "

" _Riley_ ," Sam growled, eyes trained on the road. The lines didn't really look quite straight and his vision was still swimming. He pressed down harder on the gas and the truck sped up, engine purring loudly. "Stick. Me. _Now_."

Riley grumbled but did as he was told, wrapping an elastic around Sam's bicep and poking at the large vein on the inside of his elbow until it stood up. He got the needle in on the first try, and Sam kept that arm straight as he brought his hand back to the steering wheel. Sam took the fluid pack with his left hand and propped that arm up on the door, so that it was up higher to let gravity help the process. Hopefully he'd be hydrated enough by the time they got back to base that he wouldn't pass out in front of the barracks building.

"You better have extra PTs in here."

Riley rolled his eyes and twisted in his seat again, coming back this time with a gym bag. "Yeah, yeah, but I don't have extra running shoes for you."

"Just get changed, we're not gonna be late. And don't forget about your face."

Sam had taken them back to post through a little used side gate to bypass the morning traffic, had handed the guard there his and Riley's ID cards with a glare. Riley had been in the middle of wiggling out of his tight jeans, and Sam and the guard both got an eyeful of his little green panties before Riley got his PT shorts on. They made it back to the barracks with five minutes to spare, four of which Sam used up stripping in the parking lot and squeezing himself into Riley's spare uniform. They slid into formation just as the platoon sergeant called for everyone to, "Fall in!"

In the present, Sam squeezes his eyes shut and starts a slow crawl to the bathroom to throw up. It doesn't matter now how much he drinks or how much he remembers because Riley is still dead and his body is just a ruddy smear and some stray chunks of meat left out to rot in the hot Afghan sand. Nobody could have survived a direct hit like that, not from an RPG, and even if he had, somehow, he would have died from the fall. They're only men, after all, and there's only so much abuse the body can take.

Sam empties his stomach, clutching at the porcelain rim of the toilet as he does so. Thinking about Riley hurts so damn much. It was easier when he was lying to himself, when his mind was being traitorous and protecting him from the awful truth. Riley's parents haven't been calling because there's no reason to, because they buried an empty casket down in Louisiana almost a year ago. The second bedroom in his apartment is empty because Riley has never fucking lived here in New York with him.

His movements after that are jerky and automatic. He forces himself up from his knees to stand, flushes the toilet and washes his mouth out in the bathroom sink. Sam lathers up his hands and forearms with soap and washes them too. He pulls his first aid kit out from the cabinet under the sink and sits on the closed lid of the toilet to prepare an IV for himself because while he didn't die from alcohol poisoning last night he'd rather be safe than sorry. His hands are shaking, unsteady.

He misses Riley's hands, the way they were calloused and strong, the roughness of his skin contrasting with the gentleness of his touch. Sam fumbles the first stick and overshoots his vein entirely, stabbing into the tendon on the inside of his elbow on accident. He botches the second attempt as well. After the third try he just throws the needle onto the tiles and puts his throbbing head in his hands.

His breath is coming hard and fast, panted out and too loud in the still morning air. It's too damn quiet, has been too quiet for almost a year because Riley isn't there and Sam's got to figure this shit out on his own.

Gideon's right. Sam can't just stay here in his apartment, thinking about Riley and their time together. At some point, he has to. . . to. . . not forget, because he wouldn't. He won't ever forget Riley, and his big dumb smile and the way he kissed or laughed or sang along with the radio all off-key and out of tune. The way he fought and the way he loved and the way he would get scared, sometimes. But Sam didn't die in Afghanistan, and at some point, he knows that he has to make a choice between living in the present and letting himself choke to death on the memories of the past.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Again, no fancast, as I based Sam's mom off the old comics and some badass mamas I know (she plays the same card game my mama plays, haha). The gangs are all from the Falcon/Captain America and Luke Cage comics.

Sam goes to the church and stops by his parents' house after the service on the following Sunday. His mom is thrilled to see him and makes him sit at the table, brings out more food than he can possibly be expected to eat and frets over his health. She hasn't changed much since the last time that he saw her, still short enough that he can tuck her under his chin and she smells like lavender and olive oil when they embrace. Her black hair is still shoulder length where she straightens it so that the tips curl under, her bangs still side-swept like they've always been. It's a kind of timelessness that his father doesn't have, despite the fact that she's going grey too, that she's got crows feet crinkling the corners of her dark eyes and age spots freckling her cheeks and temples, contrasted sharply against her tawny complexion. They play cards and talk about her students for a bit; Sam learns who is promising and who is struggling, who is a shoe-in for second place at the science fair and who she thinks should try out for the spring musical.

There's a charter middle school opening over in Queens that she wants to get some of the kids into. She's hoping it'll give her brightest a chance to dodge the prison pipeline, because more and more often they're getting picked up by gangs who need planners and brains instead of muscle to pull off big hits.

Sam tries to stay in Manhattan because he knows the area, the crime spots and alleys to look out for, knows which streets are gang turf and which get patrolled regularly. His parents have been in Sugar Hill all his life, and Sam's mom knows three of the officers at the local precinct and all the gangbangers who tuck in their chains and remove their hats and bandannas before coming into his father's church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights.

“That the ABCs?” Sam asks, drawing two cards from the deck and looking over his hand. His mom likes to play Shit On Your Neighbor, and she never lets him win. He's got a jack turned over on top of his stack, and three rows of discards beside it. There are two aces between them, and a stack of cards ending with a five of hearts. He plays a six and a seven, and discards a nine. His mom draws to start her turn and shakes her head.

“Oh no, those boys know better,” she says, playing three cards from her hand and one off her own stack. The card she turns over is wild, a king of spades. “We haven't had trouble with them for years, not since Lucas came back. You know that.”

Sam nods. Manhattan's crime rates have been down since the end of 2004. They've got the Bloods and the Diablos and the Ghetto Guns and the ABCs, and they're all practically sitting on top of each other these days. They throw up tags on buildings and smash in car windows when members park on the wrong streets. Sam's treated stab wounds on young men wearing the opposing gang's colors whenever one of them wanders into the other's territory. But there are surprisingly few collateral injuries when a scuffle breaks out, and they don't recruit out of schools anymore.

Because ever since Lucas Cage got out of prison, he's owned the island of Manhattan from Battery Park to the Broadway Bridge, and nobody's stupid enough to start a fight that Cage will come out to finish.

Sam hadn't been in New York to see the streets get cleaned up; he'd been at Basic when Cage was released. But it felt like everyone had heard the stories. Stories about how Cage was more monster than man after he got out of Seagate, that bullets bounced off his skin and he could lift a car clear over his head. The gangs were terrified of him. The newspapers swung between calling him a superhero like Spider-Man, who'd showed up in Queens and the Bronx two years earlier but hasn't been on the crime-fighting scene in New York since last April, and screaming that he was a dangerous thug who needed to be locked up at Attica or Dannemora.

“I can't believe you're on a first name basis with a crime boss,” Sam remarks. His mom laughs.

“Crime boss? _Lucas_?” she scoffed. “Oh, please. I went to school with that boy! Your father blessed his bar when he opened it. It's not like he's Sonny Caputo.”

“I heard he worked for Sonny Caputo, at one point, though.”

“Well,” his mom sighs, playing her king as an eight and finishing that stack with the cards in her discard rows. She tidies it up and moves it out of the way. “Well, we all make mistakes, don't we? He's a good man, now, you know. Anyway, enough about him. Tell me about how this new job's treating you.”

Sam had taken Gideon's advice and started working out of a hospital on the southern edge of East Harlem, down on 1st Avenue near the river and Yorkville. Sam had a degree in Social Work, but had been certified as a paramedic during PJ training out at Kirkland and hadn't let his credentials expire in the years since. He had already been re-certified through the NREMT as part of his transition process with the WTU, and he'd challenged the regular state refresher course when he first moved back to New York. That had let him skip over the classes he'd missed that fall and he'd just gone straight to the exam back in December.

Sam breezed through the written portion right up until the OB/GYN section, because he didn't have a goddamn clue what the difference was between placenta previa and abruptio placenta. He knew all the different kinds of shock and how to treat them, how to tell what stage a person was in, how to calculate med dosages based on patient size and weight. There were some iffy numbers he wasn't so sure on when it came to pediatric vitals on the test, but for the life of him, Sam couldn't remember a damn thing about women's health and pregnancies when he'd studied for the exam.

“What the fuck am I even reading?” Riley had complained, laying his paramedic review manual over his face. He liked to study on the floor, laid out on his back so he could hold the material above him. Sam was stretched out on the bed; they were in his barracks room because his roommate was never home and the airman Riley got stuck with this time was a loud-mouthed tool. He looked down over the edge at his wingman. “Nobody even _has_ a placenta!”

“I'm pretty sure about half the population has a placenta, actually,” Sam replied, and went back to where he had been reading over his notes on field sterilization and debridement.

Riley threw his pencil at Sam's head and missed. “Only pregnant people have placentas, man. And why do I need to know this? How many pregnant people are we going to be pulling out of combat zones?”

The answer, as it would turn out, was zero, but Riley had ended up delivering a baby at a rest stop in Alabama along I-10 once because the ambulance didn't get there in time. He'd been pissed that Sam hadn't helped, but Sam had had his hands full with the husband, who had promptly passed out and given himself a major concussion on the asphalt when he figured out that his wife had gone into labor a week early.

Sam smiles at the memory, and puts his cards down.

“It's fine, Mom. Really,” he answers, and meets her concerned gaze. “Work treats me fine. The EMTs and other paramedics are all really nice guys and gals. I'm okay. You know, a lot of vets have it worse when they come back. And they don't have anybody. But I've got you and Dad and Gideon and Sarah, and all my friends, and. . . and just because Riley is —“

Sam struggles with the words for a moment, his throat constricting around a knot of emotions. His mom reaches out to put her hand over his on the table; familiar and comforting, a quiet offer of support that he's had his whole life when things have gotten rough. He hasn't had to say it out loud yet, but he knows that he needs to. That at some point he has to, and he might as well do it in the safety of his parents' home with his mother beside him. “Is. . . is gone. He's gone.”

There's a hollow, aching feeling in his chest and a ringing in his ears, a strange kind of displacement like he's just getting back to his feet after a long fall and his vestibular system is still playing catch up. His mother squeezes his hand and Sam blows out a long, shaky breath.

“I'm. . . I'm sorry, Mom. I-I know I should be better by now, and I'm trying. I really am, and I'm. . . I'm sorry I haven't visited more.”

“Oh, Sammy,” his mom says, in a soft voice. “You visit as much or as little as you need, and you can take all the time in the world, all right? I am so proud of you for everything you've been through and everything you've done. You've been through fire, Sammy, and you've come out so much stronger than you were when you first started. You are exactly where you need to be right now, do you understand?”

He nods, swallowing hard as he wipes at his eyes with his other hand before drawing back up to five cards to start his turn.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please keep in mind that the Air Force Steve is familiar with was part of the Army (it doesn't become a separate branch of service until after he's frozen). Also, while Sam/Steve is a pairing that comes up in this fic and gets explicit later on, it is not endgame; this is a tropey love story where Sam/Riley wins out against all the odds because these losers deserve more epic romances and I am a _sap_.

March in New York is cold when it hits. There's no snow, but there's been a chill in the crisp air for weeks that makes Sam's lungs burn and his throat ache during his post-shift runs in Central Park. The sun is low and the lights are all on when he enters the park at 106th Street like usual, jogging past the edge of the Conservatory Garden until it intersects Park Drive as part of his warm up. Sam turns south on the wide paved path, gradually increasing speeding until he reaches his preferred six mile pace.

Running has helped a lot since he quit lying to himself. It feels good to get out of his apartment and physically exert himself without any lives on the line. His feet pound the pavement, his arms swinging in close, tight movements on either side of his chest, the greenery blurring on his periphery. Sam knows his body and what it's capable of, what it has already done in the past and what he knows it can handle in the future. He always enjoyed running, but lately he appreciates the control he has here more than ever before. There are balances that he understands on a run, like how to keep hydrated or refuel during long distance endurance training, or how to regulate his blood acidity during high intensity work outs.

His body never betrays him the way that his mind still sometimes does. Sometimes he still knocks on the empty bedroom door and expects Riley to answer. He started leaving the main room's window open and talking to the pigeons and sparrows that drop by to settle on his window sill or flutter over to his coffee table, picking at crumbs and whatever leftovers he hasn't gotten around to putting up. Sometimes he thinks they're responding to him when they chirp back, imagines that they're nodding along when they bob their heads, or that they're pacing thoughtfully and muddling over his words when they waddle back and forth across his floorboards. Sam hasn't been taking anything since he left the WTU, thought he didn't need to because those delusions were supposed to be side effects of his altitude and stabilizer meds and he hasn't needed those since he stopped being a Falcon last year.

His breath puffs out in white clouds in front of him, sweat dotting his brow as he passes the first mile mark, then the second. Sam's been ignoring reality because it hurts, talking to birds and empty rooms because it's easier, and there's no physical equivalent to that kind of logical treason.

So he runs. He focuses on the soreness of his calves and the low grade strain in his thigh muscles that tell him he should have stretched more before setting out. It doesn't put the past behind him, doesn't afford him the opportunity to escape the truth, but it's nice to have something other than Riley making his heart race these days.

Sam is panting hard as he passes the reservoir and the Met, as he turns onto the smaller path that'll take him down to the Bethesda Fountain before he begins to loop back around to the north for his return home. There aren't a lot of people out at this hour, but there isn't really any part of Central Park that's ever truly empty, and there's still some pedestrian traffic moving slowly along the two grand staircases heading back up to Terrace Drive or puttering through the lower passage to the rest of the mall. Around the fountain itself is a collection of couples and small groups spread out along the concrete lip of the surrounding pool, sitting and chatting amongst themselves under the calm gaze of the bronze angel statue raised at its center.

He's heading for the stairs when, by pure chance, he passes close enough to two men near the fountain to overhear one of them say, bitterly, with the promise of violence roughening his deep voice, “I'll get by just fine on my own, _thanks_ , and you can tell your director that if he wanted it, he should have pried it from my cold, dead hands when he had the chance.”

It's the unspoken threat of escalation that gets Sam to slow to a jog and then pause on the red bricks of the lower terrace, moving closer as he pretends to stretch out a cramp in his hamstring so that he has an excuse to be nearby. New Yorkers talk a lot of shit, so it's really a pretty small risk in the grand scheme of things, all things considered, but the guy sounds like Riley used to, when he was ready for a fight and didn't care about the consequences. Like he's been looking for an excuse to throw a punch for awhile now and he couldn't care less that his opponent is a pasty, mild-looking older guy with thinning brown hair in a well-tailored black suit if it means that he can get that brutal ferocity out that's been itching just under the speaker's skin.

A house sparrow settles on the concrete next to the man, grey-bellied and brown-backed, a tuft of black breast feathers just under its short beak. It hops closer to the man's fingers, inquisitive, as Sam watches them. The speaker is young and blond, hair greasy and unwashed, but regulation short in the back and on the sides, a little long up top with the bangs swept to the side off his forehead. His strong, square jaw is clean-shaven and sharply set, blue eyes burning with controlled rage. He's broad shouldered and tense under the grungy lightweight jacket he's wearing, and even sitting Sam can tell that he'd be a big, fit man if he got up to his feet. Sam can't quite put his finger on it, but there's something familiar about him and his good ol' boy, All-American looks that gives away his military background.

“Or maybe it's the jump boots,” the sparrow quips. Sam glances to the man's feet, and sure enough, those are black leather Corcorans. He can't tell if they're ladder-laced because the top half of the boots are covered by the man's dirty khakis, but the ankles are reinforced and the toes are capped, and Sam had spent enough time at Fort Bragg to recognize jump boots when he saw them. There's something that looks like a padded wheel case for a road bike leaning against the concrete next to the man, and he's got one hand on it protectively.

So. He's probably an Army veteran, and given the odds and the man's appearance, Sam would bet good money on the possibility of him being homeless. Sam knows that the majority of veterans aren't violent post-separation, but he might deck a guy, too, if they were being pushy with him at night in Central Park.

The older man's expression crumbles from something oddly reverent to confused and apologetic. He hesitates, then frowns and says, “I think you're being a little unreasonable, sir.”

“Really,” the other deadpans. He looks like he wants to drown the older guy in the basin behind him. “Because I've been told I'm a pretty reasonable fella.”

“I'm sure we can sort this all out, sir, if you'd just come back with —“

“I'm not going anywhere with you, _agent_ ,” the man interrupts harshly. “I don't owe you, or Fury, or the U.S. government a damn thing.”

“Please, Captain Ro—“

“I'd leave the man alone, if I were you,” Sam finds himself saying, and both men turn to look at him. The blond — a former Army captain? — looks startled to have someone speaking on his behalf, and the older man — an agent, apparently, but of what? — seems annoyed by the intrusion.

“Excuse me?” the agent says.

“You heard me,” Sam replies, looking the agent up and then down again, obviously unimpressed with the results of his scan. The sparrow cheeps appreciatively, like it approves of Sam's methods. “And between the two of us, I don't think you stand much of a chance.”

The agent sighs a deep breath out through his nose. He seems to consider making more of a scene than they're already causing, but decides against it. Several other people have started glancing their way, and a boy across the terrace has his phone out like he's about to start recording. The agent reaches into his suit jacket and pulls out a plain-looking business card with some kind of government insignia in the upper left corner, offering it to the captain.

“If you change your mind, sir, the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division's door will always be open to you,” he says. Sam doesn't recognize the name of the agency, and with a name that long he thinks he would have if he'd ever heard of it before. The captain continues to glare at the older man until he falters and puts the card back, turning sharply and beating a swift retreat under the man's steady gaze. When he disappears from view down the path into the park, the captain redirects his attention to Sam, though his glare loses its heat.

“New Yorkers, am I right?” Sam says rhetorically with a shrug, and the blond snorts.

“I'd say they were never that weird, but honestly the strangeness is the only thing that's familiar anymore,” he replies. Sam smiles and nods to the man's boots.

“You just get back?” Sam asks, and at the other's confused look, he gestures more broadly to his entire person. “You're military, aren't you?”

“I was,” the man corrects, tone going cautious. “Army.”

“Air Force,” Sam says, and there's another brief flash of confusion over the captain's face before smoothing back out into blankness. “I got out, too. 'Bout a year ago now. When did you get back?”

They watch each other for a long minute after that, as he takes Sam in, assessing him for threat and motive.

“About three days ago,” he finally says. Sam's brows both go up.

“You got back from a deployment three days ago, or you got out of the Army three days ago?”

“Yeah,” he says, and flashes Sam a wry, humorless smile. It doesn't reach his strikingly blue eyes.

“Shit,” Sam says, because he doesn't know what else to say. On further consideration, he doesn't think there's really anything else fitting to say to that. Nobody gets back and then out that quickly unless trouble was involved. He offers the man his hand to shake. “Sam Wilson.”

“Rogers,” the man says, relaxing and taking Sam's hand. “Steve.”

His grip is strong and firm, big and warm and dry, when they shake. Sam is embarrassed to note that he thinks Rogers has nice hands, and the embarrassment is followed by a sharp stab of guilt. He's got Riley, he doesn't need to be thinking about —

Except that Sam doesn't have Riley, not anymore. He has to remind himself that there isn't anything wrong with noticing that someone else is attractive almost a year after his last partner's death. He pulls his hand back and tucks both into the pockets of his running shorts. “Well, thank you for your service, Rogers. Let me buy you a coffee?”

“I thought you already got in your charitable act for the day?” Rogers muses, heavy on the sarcasm, mouth quirking up self-deprecatingly on one side. He reaches up to run the fingers of one hand through his bangs, smoothing them down. It takes Sam a second to realize that he's being teased, and honestly he can't tell if they're flirting or not. He doesn't mean it that way, not right now, and it's been so long since he was in the game that he's out of practice anyway.

“Hey, I may be a saint, but you don't look like a charity case,” Sam replies easily enough, and points east down Terrace Drive. “Oren's is on Lexington, off 71st, and they're open 'til seven. What do you say?”

“. . . Yeah, okay, sure,” Rogers agrees, and grabs the wheel case as he gets up to his feet. Sam was right; he is a big man, taller than Sam is and maybe even Gideon, with his torso tapering from those wide shoulders to an almost impossibly slim waist. It gives him the kind of silhouette that's hard to look away from and that Sam only sees in fitness magazines on guys who have been Photoshopped. “Lead the way.”

It's about a half-mile to the coffee shop, and they make the ten minute walk mostly in a companionable silence. Sam asks about Rogers's deployment as they're turning down Lexington. “Were you deployed to Iraq, or Afghanistan?”

“What?” Rogers seems baffled for a moment, then shakes his head. “Oh. No, neither. My unit was on the Eastern Front.”

Sam doesn't think he's heard anyone refer to 'the eastern front' since his U.S. history class covered World War II. He doesn't know a lot about what's been going on over there recently, but Rogers has paratroopers boots on. The only airborne unit in USAREUR that Sam knows of is the 173rd Infantry out of Vicenza, Italy. Sam clarifies, just to be sure. “So. . . what, Europe?”

Rogers gapes at him, like he can't believe that it needs to be said, then huffs a short-lived laugh and nods. “Yeah. _Europe_.”

And that's. . . well, that's not what Sam was expecting. He's watching Rogers scan the streets, look at the cars, hold himself and his wheel case like he might need to use either of them as a weapon at a moment's notice. Sam can tell that Rogers is a combat vet, but to his knowledge, American troops haven't been involved in much of anything in Europe outside of Kosovo back in the '90s. He holds the door open for Rogers to go first when they arrive at Oren's, and falls into step beside him as they get in line, both surveying the posted menu. It isn't busy at this hour, but it's New York and the coffee is good, so the place isn't empty, either.

They make their way up through the line, and it's just before they're about to order that Sam is able to place that initial, odd sense of familiarity. He nudges Rogers with his elbow, grinning. “Hey, anyone ever tell you that you look like Captain America?”

Rogers opens his mouth to reply, but all that comes out is a disbelieving guffaw that catches them both off-guard. He can't seem to stop it, and has to put a hand on Sam's shoulder to steady himself. Soon, he's laughing so hard there are tears in his eyes, his body shaking and his face red.

Sam chuckles along, but doesn't get the joke. The barista manning the register just watches them patiently with that neutral, customer-service smile fixed in place.

Rogers wipes at his eyes and squeezes Sam's shoulder. “Yeah,” he wheezes. “Yeah, I played him in a movie once.”


	9. Chapter 9

They take their coffees from the counter and sit down at a table near one of the windows. The cafe’s entrance is behind Sam and Rogers has the back wall in his blind spot, one of his big shoulders pressed against the glass as he stares down at his cup like it might have dubiously magical properties that allow him to divine the future from it, or something. Sam keeps his tone light as he asks, “So, Rogers. You got a place to stay?”

Rogers shrugs. “Sure I do,” he answers, easily enough that it is just as intentionally casual as Sam had been a second ago, and takes a careful sip of his coffee. He drinks it slow, though Sam thinks that has less to do with savoring the quality of the brew and more to do with the price. Rogers had flinched at the register when Sam paid, and Sam recognized that specific kind of phantom pain as meaning someone had a shitty poker face and an empty wallet. They drink in silence for a few beats until it becomes obvious that Sam is waiting for Rogers to elaborate, at which point he turns his head to squint out the window at a young woman with an offensively bright pink dye job. “I’m down on East 30th.”

“The men’s shelter?” Sam asks, brows going up, more surprised by the fact that he isn’t surprised at all. He recognizes the vagueness of the address from some of the guys in his group therapy sessions; there’s a temporary housing intake center down there. Rogers is a recently returned Army vet with little to no money, and the abruptness of his discharge doesn’t bode well for Honorable service. He probably doesn’t have access to most of the VA resources that would have otherwise been available to him. So, really, it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to put two and two together. 

Across the table, Rogers stiffens, shoulders going back and chin coming up defensively, spine straightening from where he was beginning to slouch down and jaw going tight. Sam raises his hands in a placating gesture, and backtracks:

“No, no, I don’t mean it like — Look, I get it. I don’t think there’s any shame in it, okay? The resources are there to be used when you need them. It’s tough getting back on your feet after coming home.”

“You’ve got no idea,” Rogers snaps. Sam shoots him a dry, unimpressed look that gets Rogers to shift in embarrassment when he realizes that Sam isn’t looking for a fight. He coughs, ducking his head and taking a longer drink of his coffee, to cover. And okay, no, Sam doesn’t know everything about Rogers. Hell, he doesn’t really know him at all, but the sad truth is that it isn’t a particularly unique story for guys like them. The only difference Sam can see here is that one of them came home with somewhere to go and the other didn’t. Rogers sighs, defenses visible crumbling. He slumps back down, legs sliding under the table until his feet and knees knock into Sam’s like he has no idea how big he is when sprawled out like that. “There’s no home to go back to. My apartment building doesn’t even exist anymore. I-it got torn down while I was. . . Overseas.”

Sam whistles. “Ooo, that’s rough. Your landlord must’ve been a crook to do that while you were deployed. Were you still paying rent?”

“Not exactly,” Rogers hedges. He gives Sam a grim, tight smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. It reminds Sam altogether too much of the way Riley used to look when he was talking about his dad, and he has to blink and turn his attention out the window to wrestle back a sick feeling in his gut. “I was kind of ‘killed in action’ for awhile, so. Can’t say I blame him for giving up my old room.”

“Damn.” Sam shakes his head. “And you’ve got no one in the city to stay with, huh?”

“No.” Sam looks back just in time to see the smile fall away. Rogers’s face goes eerily blank as he shifts in his seat, gaze sliding past Sam to the entrance over his shoulder. It isn’t quite a thousand yard stare, not shell shocked enough for Sam to be worried that his companion has wandered off into his memories, but it’s damn close. “They’re all dead.” It’s the kind of blunt tactlessness that some people get when they’re still getting used to an idea, Sam thinks. Like Rogers has been repeating it to himself in the hopes that it might lose some of its impact but is still waiting for it to really sink in. There’s a quiet, understated kind of grief there that Sam knows but can’t empathize with. “Everybody’s dead,” he repeats, softer now.

Sam can’t even imagine what he would have done if his parents hadn’t been around. If Gideon hadn’t shown up outside his apartment to help drag him back into reality. If he couldn’t check his phone and see the messages his sister keeps leaving him. “Why don’t you stay with me?” he offers, his mouth forming the words before his brain has had a chance to really consider the idea. And why not? Sam has an empty room in his apartment that he might as well put to some kind of use.

It’s not like Riley’s going to care, not like he has a lot in that room right now anyway. The only reason Sam has anything of Riley’s was because they’d lived together in secret and Riley had put all his girly clothes and makeup and shit he hadn’t wanted his mama to pack in Sam’s storage unit just in case he came home in a box. All the rest of his belongings had gone back to Louisiana, because as far as the Air Force was concerned, Sam had just been Riley’s team leader. Riley had just been his wingman, and Sam didn’t have any right to him after he was gone.

“For a little while, I mean,” Sam clarifies. “It’s not much, but there’s a bed, and you won’t have to share the bathroom with a company’s worth of strangers.”

“I appreciate it. Really, I do,” Rogers says, shaking his head. His mouth quirks up on one side. “But I don’t need your charity. I can get by on my own.”

“I’m sure you can,” Sam agrees, and he knows he’s parroting his therapist from the WTU a little when he goes on to say, “but you don’t have to. I don’t think you’re a charity case; you’re a soldier, like me, and sometimes we need help, you know? Accepting help when it’s offered. . . That’s not weakness. It takes a certain kind of strength to be able to do that, too.”

Rogers chuckles a little, a sad sound as his smile tilts into resignation. “You sound like my friend,” he says, and Sam knows right away that the man is dead. That Rogers lost him the way he lost Riley; like it’s an ache in his chest that never quite goes away. Like he’s putting up a united front when all he wants to do is scream.

“Well, he must’ve been a great guy, then,” Sam jokes, because how else is he supposed to respond to that? Rogers reminds him of someone he lost, too, and the only way they’re going to make it through this godawful part of the conversation where they pretend that they’re not drowning under the pressure of recovery, of pretending that they don’t regret surviving when better men didn’t, is with a little gallows humor. “Smart and handsome like me, too, I’ll bet.”

“Oh yeah,” Rogers assures him, all wide-eyed and faux-earnest, which is an unsurprisingly good look for him. “And real modest to boot.”

“Only the good die young,” Sam says, his playful tone faltering. Rogers looks back out the window.

“. . . No wonder we’re still here.” Sam lifts the last of his overpriced coffee in a toast to that. They tap their paper cups together, and that’s the end of that.

* * *

Sam brings Rogers back to his apartment, and spends altogether too long standing in front of Riley’s door with his hand on the knob. He has to open the door to show Rogers the inside but he. . . He can’t. He hasn’t opened this door yet. Sam tries telling himself for the hundredth time that it isn’t really Riley’s door, isn’t Riley’s room at all because Riley is gone. Rile is dead, and they never lived together in New York. His hand is clammy on the metal of the knob, and he can’t get his wrist to turn.

“You can stay here,” he says, swallowing hard. It feels like he’s going to throw up and his eyes are scratchy when he blinks, like there’s sand caught beneath his flight goggles. Rogers is standing behind him, a little off to one side, watching. “I have this extra room.” He doesn’t open the door.

This is not a betrayal. Sam isn’t doing anything wrong. He’s offering a guy who is down on his luck a place to stay, that’s all. It shouldn’t matter that Rogers is blond and beautiful, like Riley was, but not at all like Riley past those shallow surface details. But there’s still shame and guilt making his stomach roil at the thought of giving that room to anybody else.

Rogers looks between Sam and the closed door for another moment, then puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder. Sam doesn’t know how he knows, but it seems like he gets it. Why it’s so hard and why Sam doesn’t want him in there. He says, “How about I stay on the couch instead?”

Relief floods through him. There’s a knot in Sam’s throat that makes it tough to talk, so he just nods and releases the door knob. Keeps the door closed for another day. He’s not ready to go in there just yet.

“Can I use your shower?” Rogers asks. His voice is soft, apologetic. Like he thinks his being there is an imposition, even though he has an invitation. Sam coughs, shakes his head, and wipes a sweaty hand down his face.

“Y-yeah. Yeah, it’s down the hall. I’ll lend you something to wear.” Sam doesn’t wait for Rogers to nod. He heads into his own room and roots around in his drawers for a pair of gym shorts and a shirt he won’t mind getting stretched out. The shower starts down the hall, and he remembers that he hasn’t put away his laundry yet. Rogers probably wouldn’t mind using the same towel that Sam had used that morning, but Sam’s mother would have thrown a fit if she knew he was even considering being a bad host.

It only takes a moment to dig through the clean laundry bag to find his other towels; Sam always waits to wash them all at the same time to cut down on the number of trips to the laundromat. He grabs one, and with it and the clothes, goes to tap on the bathroom door.

Rogers hasn’t closed it all the way, and it swings inward at Sam’s touch.

Riley hadn’t been a natural blond. He had brown hair that he used to carefully dye in bathroom sinks during overnight layovers whenever they traveled for training. He liked the way it looked and, as long as it was a dark blond and he touched up the roots between courses, most of the instructors couldn’t tell and wouldn’t give him shit over it.

Sam used to give him shit, though. It was practically his job to give Riley extra shit about it because no one else did.

“You spend more time on your hair than any woman I’ve ever been with,” Sam had informed from his spot on one of the hotel beds where he was flipping through a magazine. Riley had his shirt off and Sam wasn’t looking because this was his friend and he thought Riley was straight at that point. Sam was in a long distance relationship with a cute fuel systems specialist he’d met at Fort Bragg, anyway. They were in Denver, flying from Key West to Seattle after Combat Divers’ School back in 2005. He remembers the smell of the bleach in the room, and the dark tan lines on the back of Riley’s neck and around his arms.

“You been with some low-maintenance girls, then,” Riley shot back.

“You gonna do _your eyebrows_ , too, while you’re over there, princess?” Sam asked. He glanced up in time to see Riley make a face in the mirror. He had a little beauty mark on his lower back, to the right of his spine, just above the waistband of his loose sweats. “Make sure you look all pretty before we —“

“Shut up, man,” Riley grumbled, clearly embarrassed and annoyed but fighting a laugh all the same.

“Aw, don’t be like that, Riley,” Sam teased. He put on the most sincere expression he could muster, but the effect was marred by his own grin. “You know I think you’re prettiest PJ in the whole Air Force.”

Riley ducked his chin and there was that smile and that blush and all Sam had wanted to do in that moment was kiss him, girls and careers be damned. “Yeah?” Riley asked, a little bit too quiet, too shy. Then he jerked his head up and smirked at Sam’s reflection in the mirror, quick like he hadn’t meant that first bit to come out like that and now he had to cover it up. He said, all bluster and bravado this time, “Yeah, you’re damn fuckin’ right I am.”

In the present, Rogers turns away from the mirror, his shirt wet and soapy in his hands where he was washing it in the sink, to meet Sam’s open-mouthed stare. And Sam is staring, he knows he is but he can’t help it, because Rogers. . . Rogers is. . .

He doesn’t look a damn thing like Riley. He’s about four inches too tall and fifty pounds of muscle too big, but the thing is is that people don’t actually look like this, not in real life. His skin is too smooth, too perfect; looks warm and soft and all his muscles too hard beneath it. The sharp lines of his hips and lower abdominals can’t be maintained on a deployment diet. There are no scars or beauty marks or tan lines from wearing the same uniform out on patrol for days on end. Sam’s eyes catch on the slope of his sculpted torso and broad chest, his wide shoulders and tense biceps, the tendons in his forearms that stand out as his strong hands tighten on his shirt. . . Sam has seen a lot of bodies in his time in the Air Force and now as a paramedic, and no body has that kind of careful definition or symmetry naturally. People don’t. . . They don’t. . .

They don’t look like _this_.

Rogers looks like a statue brought to life. He looks like something carved and shaped in an art studio, or a laboratory, like some kind of male power fantasy dreamed up by a sexually confused fourteen year old boy. It’s strange. It’s foreign and unnatural and exotic in a way Sam didn’t think he’d ever use that word to describe someone physically. His dick gives a twitch of interest in his running shorts.

“You need something?” Rogers asks, and Sam finally brings his eyes up from the dusty pink of the man’s nipples to the tense line of his jaw, resolutely set. Rogers puts the shirt down on the corner of the sink and reaches for his belt to undo it with sudsy fingers. The buckle clanks loudly in the silence between them. They hold eye contact while Rogers pulls it slowly from his belt loops and drops it to the floor like a gauntlet. Like a challenge, defiant and combative. Like what he’s really saying is, ‘whatever you want from me, you’ll have to _take it_.’

The implication makes any feelings of desire or arousal wither. Sam’s pretty sure he’s going to _throw the fuck up_ in his kitchen sink in a minute.

“No, I do not,” Sam replies, a little too loud, too hard, and he tosses the clothes and towel at Rogers and slams the door shut.


	10. Chapter 10

Sam doesn’t dream of Bakhmala, but he dreams of Riley that night, the two of them strapped into their EXO-7 harnesses and soaring through the clouds. Riley is going too high, backlit by the sun with the light gleaming off his outstretched wings, and the air feels too thin as Sam watches his spiraling climb from a lower current.

This isn’t a memory. He’s not wearing his helmet or body armor, and can feel the wind on his face and rushing past his ears. Sam knows he must be dreaming, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling dizzy or keep his heart from trying to pound its way out of his chest. They’re so high up he can’t even see the ground anymore.

Not that he could ever look away from Riley.

His wingpack’s engine roars to life between his shoulder blades, his core muscles contracting to hold him steady and brace against the jerk of increased momentum as he struggles to match Riley’s speed. 

“You’ll catch me, right?” He must feel Riley say it, sounding like 2008 and a hundred training exercises over the empty woodlands and drop zones of North Carolina, because neither of them are wearing comms and the distance is far too great for him to have heard him speak without them. Riley has his head tilted back, upturned to the sky. His flight goggles are down and Sam can’t see his face and he needs to, now more than ever. “If I fall?”

 _Don’t you leave me behind_ , Riley had said, but Sam doesn’t make it back either. Not really. Not in any of the ways that matter. He feels it in his bones, in his blood, deep deep deep inside at the very apex of his soul. They’re both still out in the shit, high above a desert in a country they don’t actually care about, flying into danger for people who would rather die than be saved by men like them. His harness straps dig into his shoulders and chest, and his lower back feels like it’s on fire where the engine blasts out hot air where his t-shirt and the wingpack’s narrow spinal flap doesn’t protect him. But he presses forward, urging the EXO-7 to take him higher, faster.

It won’t be enough. Sam knows it won’t be enough, but God, he has to try.

Riley’s wings snap back, tucked in close to his sides. He continues to rise for a single moment, stalling out in slow motion before he succumbs to the power of gravity. His body tips, a graceful arc as the engine in his wingpack cuts out just as the sky goes dark and starless around them. There’s an explosion to Sam’s left, blinding light of an RPG slamming into its target, and then there’s shrapnel cutting into his unprotected skin and smoke clawing down his throat as he is forced to watch Riley plummet to the earth all over again.

* * *

He wakes choking on Riley’s name, sweaty and panicked with big hands on his shoulders holding him down in the tangled mess of his blankets and bedsheets. It takes him a minute to realize where and when he is, to recognize that the hands belong to Rogers and that he isn’t dreaming anymore.

“You okay?” Rogers asks after Sam has found his breath and stopped struggling. Sam nods, panting, but he doesn’t let go. Rogers is kneeling on the edge of the bed in the clothes he borrowed, Sam’s old PT shirt stretched tight across his chest and the sleeves straining against his biceps. His hair is sticking up every which way, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Sam woke him.

“Sorry,” he mutters weakly, but Rogers just shakes his head.

“Don’t be,” he says. “Bucky used to —” he cuts himself off sharply, head turning so that he doesn’t have to meet Sam’s gaze. There’s a tick going off in his cheek where his teeth clench, and his nostrils flare a little as he takes a deep breath through his nose. He’s even less ready to be back in the world than Sam is, like the Army forgot to stitch him closed four days ago and now he’s just waiting for the sluggish blood loss or inevitable sepsis to finish him off.

Rogers removes his hands and sits back to allow Sam room to ease himself up. He gets his back against the headboard, draws his knees to his chest and wraps his arms loosely around his legs. “Riley.”

“What?” Rogers looks back with a start.

“My wingman. My. . .” Sam falters, not sure that he’s up to explaining all the things that Riley had been to him. So he doesn’t, and says instead, “We deployed together. I came home, and he didn’t. It’s been. . .”

“Yeah,” Rogers finishes for him, nodding. “Bucky was. . . We served together, too. He was my sergeant.”

Sam is about to offer him a weak smile that he knows won’t reach his eyes and crack another joke like he had back at the coffee shop, when they hear the knock on the front door. It’s not unusually early but Sam isn’t expecting company, so it catches him by surprise. It startles Rogers, too, who jerks a hand out like he’s reaching for a weapon that isn’t there. They exchange wary, confused looks, but once it becomes obvious that the loud and insistent pounding isn’t going away on its own, Sam huffs a sigh and gets to his feet, pausing for a moment to wipe the sweat and tears off his face with the edge of the top sheet. “I got it,” he says.

He tosses a shirt on as he exits the bedroom, bypassing the couch where Rogers had left the spare blanket balled up on the floor next to his wheel case when he had rushed to Sam’s side. And, well, Sam can’t help feeling embarrassed. He isn’t sure what brought on the nightmare, but he’d thought he was doing okay before. Not great, granted, but distinctly average. Okay. Hell, maybe even _normal_.

It is only through a sheer act of will that Sam doesn’t pause in front of Riley’s door, and the urge is coupled with a sinking sense of disappointment and failure at his own lack of progress. Because now, he knows that it isn’t really Riley’s door. It’s just the door to an empty second bedroom. There is no one on the other side. 

He is hit with the terrifying possibility that maybe this is it. Maybe this is what recovery is always going to look like for him; bad dreams and closed doors and talking to birds. The bottom of his stomach drops out ominously like his body is anticipating a fall. If this is as good as it gets. . . Sam doesn’t know if he can live the rest of his life like that.

With that weighing heavily on his shoulders, and the familiar low thrum of anxiety and adrenaline still itching under his flushed skin, Sam isn’t in the best headspace when he answers the front door with a tired, “What?”

His siblings are standing on the other side, Gideon wearing his usual judgmental frown and his little sister Sarah snorting through her nose in an entirely unladylike fashion. They’re bundled up with hats and scarves, and Sarah’s even got a pair of little blue gloves on, both wearing jeans with their coats buttoned up to the collars to keep out the chill.

Sam hasn’t seen Sarah since 2010, when he visited home while on block leave after that first tour, and, just like then, he somehow keeps forgetting that she isn’t still some mouthy twelve year old with ambitions to annoy him to death or insanity. It’s a shock every time he realizes that she’s become a grown up at some point while he wasn’t looking, a pretty young woman with bright amber eyes and medium brown skin like Gideon’s and their mother’s, all warm undertones that give her a constant, open glow. She wears mulberry lip stains instead of glitter gloss these days, and she’s taller than he thinks he remembers her ever being; a quick glance down informs him that her knee high boots are flat, and it’s just his memory playing tricks on him again.

“Well, good morning to you, too!” Sarah announces, and shoves past Sam into his apartment without waiting for an invitation. She’s the baby of the Wilson family, and she never had much use for manners because her brothers and father used to always let her get away with everything on account of being little and feminine and cute back then. Sam decides that she definitely isn’t any of those things anymore, and he probably would have done better by her if he’d been more of a hard-ass in the past. Her hair has been straightened into loose flowing waves that brush just below her jawline this morning, bouncing as she skids to a stop at the end of his hallway where it opens into the living room.

“Woah,” Sarah says, looking at Rogers, who had just stepped out of Sam’s bedroom to retrieve his things. “Who. . .?”

Sam knows what she’s thinking, can hear it in the way she holds onto the vowel and lets the sound drag out. It grates on his already raw nerves, and he can feel the indignation and shame burn a hot swath across his face and down his throat. He scowls, and lets Gideon inside, closing the door roughly behind him. “It’s not like that, Sarah. He’s a friend. Just needed a place to stay for a bit. That’s _all_.”

“Hey, I’m not judging,” she says, playfully glib, as she turns back to him with her hands on her hips. “You’re a big boy, Sam, if you want to pick up hunky guys —”

It is precisely the wrong thing to say, especially this particular morning, with the grisly images of Riley’s death hovering like sunspots behind his eyelids whenever he blinks. He flinches at the accusation, a full body cringe that makes Sarah cover her mouth in horror when she realizes what she just said and who she said it to. Gideon puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder, but doesn’t say anything, his face a stony mask.

“Oh, my God, Sammy, no. I-I didn’t mean it like that, I was joking.” Sarah says, her voice gone soft with remorse and trepidation, “I was joking, I’m sorry. It wasn’t funny, and I am _so_ sorry.”

It doesn’t actually make it any better. They are all painfully aware of the fact that she never made that kind of comment to Gideon after he lost his wife, and Sam isn’t sure if that’s because they were actually married or because Aaliyah was a woman that Sarah knew. His family never met Riley; to them, Riley was just the good-looking white boy standing next to Sam in a handful of shared photographs and then a boyfriend mentioned in those later letters and phone calls home.

The worst part, he thinks, is that he did think about picking Rogers up when he brought him back here, however abstractly. There’s no denying that Rogers is an attractive man, and Sam feels inappropriately guilty given that he hasn’t done anything wrong.

Rogers looks uneasily between the Wilsons standing at the entry to the living room and the wheel case by the couch like he’s planning to dive for his stuff and then exit via the window.

“I can go,” he says, but Sam just shakes his head to dismiss the offer.

“No, you’re fine,” Sam says quickly. He wipes a hand down his face and turns his attention back to his siblings. “What are you two even doing here?”

“Dragging you out of your apartment,” Sarah informs him, shoulders going back and chin coming up like she fully expects him to argue against it. “They still have the Greenmarket in Union Square, and there’s a street fair going on this weekend down Park Ave and Broadway. I thought it would be fun, you know, for the three of us to go out. I tried to call you about it, but you never answer my calls or texts anymore.”

Sam rolls his eyes, but knows that he’s been the asshole here and this is his fault. Sarah is trying her best, and she probably doesn’t actually have all the time in the world to spare making sure that Sam isn’t holing up in his apartment all day every day being miserable. Same with Gideon; they’ve both got lives and other things going on now. Sarah is in her final year at CUNY, getting a Master’s Degree in Journalism with a specialization in urban reporting. Gideon is getting ready to take over their father’s congregation and just sent Jim off to Mexico for a year of work with the Peace Corps.

“. . . Okay,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut for a moment to collect himself. “Yeah, okay, that sounds. . . Yeah. I’ll go.”

“You can come, too,” Sarah says to Rogers, who looks vaguely uncomfortable at the extended invitation.

“Oh, uhm, I wouldn’t want to intru—” he begins to politely decline, but Sarah shakes her head and puts her foot down the way only a baby sister can:

“Good thing I wasn’t asking. Now, get dressed and let’s go.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor changes have been made to this chapter since its original posting.

They take the subway to Union Square, and Rogers keeps mostly to himself the whole way, despite Sarah's attempts to pull him into conversation. Rogers had been out of the States for a long time, apparently, and hadn't bothered to keep up with the news or pop culture. He doesn’t seem to know any of the recent issues, bands, or television shows she mentions. Sam doesn’t even think to start running interference until she tries to engage him in a sports debate that he knows for a fact will just be a flimsy pretense for her to wax poetic about Alex Rodriguez’s butt.

“You don’t care about the Yankees,” he teases, interrupting before his sister gets on a roll. “You just want to talk about your boy. Isn’t he on the disabled list again?” Sarah bristles.

“Oh my _God_ , A-Rod has been back since _August_ ,” she snaps. Rogers mouths the nickname at Sam over her head, exaggerated like he isn’t sure if it’s a name or just a word, and well. It’s a shame that Rogers isn’t into sports, either. Or maybe he’s a football fan; he’s got the build for it, and Sam knows better than to get his hopes up about the likelihood of Rogers following college basketball. Instead of answering, Sam shrugs and waves the unspoken question off as Sarah goes on to say, “And he’s gonna pass Lou Gehrig for career grand slams this year, just you wait and see!”

“Gehrig still has the most?” Rogers asks, perking up noticeably and confusing Sam’s earlier assumption.

“Not for long!” Sarah preens proudly, as though she has anything to do with a professional player’s ranking and the MLB hall of fame. Sam catches Gideon rolling his eyes as the train car slides to a stop at their station.

Exiting the subway terminal brings them up on the southern end of Union Square, with the Greenmarket stretching out up the street one way and the barricades keeping traffic out of the street fair sprawling down the other side. A group of dancers are performing to the east of the chess boards where the steps are, and Rogers stares at them a little as they backflip and spin on their heads like he’s never seen a b-boy before. Sam squints against the sudden brightness and frowns at the good weather overhead.

Except for work and his run route, Sam hasn’t left Harlem in over a month. Even then, he makes a pointed effort not to look up when he’s driving around in the ambulance. Union Square might still be Manhattan, and not even that far away as the crow flies, but the air feels different and the sky seems too big, too wide, too blue out here. Looking up feels like falling, spiraling through the atmosphere on one wing with his engine shot out and smoke trailing behind him. Like any second now he’ll feel the ground rush up to meet him.

It doesn’t make him flashback to Bakhmala, but his hands are shaking as he stuffs them deep into the pockets of his jacket so his siblings don’t see. His eyes are starting to smart and his throat hurts. His chest is on fire and his spine aches with the phantom weight of his wingpack. He feels so fucking stupid. Sam didn’t crash in Bakhmala; he wasn’t the one who got shot out of the sky and have what was left of his body abandoned in the dirt. He landed just fine, grabbed Khalid Khandil and brought him back to the combat outpost where it had turned out that he wasn’t an insurgent at all but a British intelligence officer in deep cover. He hates himself a little for the way he’s getting worked up for no reason. Riley died at night over the outskirts of an Afghani village that had never seen a paved road, not during a bright, clear spring day in New York City.

Sarah snags Sam's arm and tugs him toward Broadway with Gideon and Rogers bringing up the rear. “Come on!”

He keeps his head down as his sister drags him through the street fair and focuses on the present. On the people milling around the booths. He listens to their footsteps on the cracked pavement and the cooing pigeons nearby, snippets of conversation and the subtle sounds of music drifting up from a stranger's headphones. They pass vendor stalls and tables with shirts and soaps and reclaimed scrap metal twisted into art. He breathes in the different food smells wafting up from the carts that make his mouth water and remind him he hasn’t eaten breakfast yet. There are fried breads and kebabs and gyros and corn-on-the-cob. Sam spots a place selling giant turkey legs that he thinks ought to be considered out of season by now. Sarah pauses in front of a display of purses and jewelry, surveying quickly before deciding that nothing is stylish enough for her discerning palette, and Sam falls into step behind her next to Rogers, who looks as overwhelmed as Sam feels.

“Been awhile, huh?” he asks, instead of suggesting they grab a bite. It’s nice, he thinks, not to be the only one struggling. Rogers huffs a dry laugh.

“Yeah, it's not the crowds. It's just. . . different, you know, than I remember.”

“What, they don't have street fairs in Europe?” Sam asks. Rogers chuckles, like Sam's missing out on the big joke.

“Not when I was there.”

“Were you in Europe a long time with the Army?” Gideon asks, his voice weirdly neutral, and just like that, Sam knows that he’s about to start some shit. Rogers must hear something in Gideon’s tone, too, because he also tenses up; his shoulders go back and his grip on the handle of the black wheel case he brought with him goes white-knuckled.

“You could say that,” Rogers answers cautiously, side-eyeing Gideon.

“You know, not a whole lot going on in Europe right now,” Gideon points out, not bothering to obscure his disdain despite literally no one asking for his opinion. Sam knows exactly where this is headed because they’ve had similar fights many times over the years since Sam left New York for Basic back in 2004. Sam hadn’t enlisted in the first wave of patriotism that swept through the city in the aftermath of 9/11, choosing instead to finish his Bachelor’s degree, but this had always been a point of contention between the two of them. Gideon never understood Sam’s desire to serve, and he had a whole list of reasons for disapproving of the so-called ‘military industrial complex.’ Sam groans, loudly, to signal that he doesn’t want to hear the next bit of self-righteous bullshit his brother is about to start peddling, but Gideon ignores the unsubtle hint to add, “And even if there was, it’s not our business.”

Rogers’s eyes narrow and he sets his jaw. Sam might not know him very well yet, but he’s already starting to recognize what Rogers looks like when he’s gearing up for a brawl. Gideon meets his gaze and they stare each other down like they’re waiting for the other to start a scene in the middle of the street. Sam shoves his hands deeper into his pockets and ducks his head to glare at the asphalt.

He’d thought they were doing better. Gideon was always going to be Gideon; he was far too old and set in his ways to go about changing his most deeply held political beliefs, but they’d been working hard on setting their differences aside since that visit back in February. Hell, maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe Gideon is picking this fight with Rogers because he can’t keep picking it with Sam when it’s so obvious that Sam came home fucked up.

“It’s the business of good men anywhere when innocent people are dying,” Rogers replies, drawing the proverbial line in the sand. “Or is there an embargo on human decency now, too?”

Gideon scoffs. “Being an attack dog for the Ellis administration has nothing to do with ‘human decency.’ Every time we go to war, some tyrant trots out this tired ‘just cause’ nonsense when it was never about protecting people in the first place! It’s just another rich, white man’s war fought by the poor to exploit —”

“Come on, lay off,” Sarah interrupts as she returns from the latest booth, taking his hand to pull him away toward the next one. Sam’s grateful to have her there to redirect, because he doesn’t want to get involved. They all know how this will play out if he does, and Sam doesn’t want to end up screaming at his brother again. Especially not today, not after this morning. Not with Riley’s fall on his mind and the heavy taste of sand still in his mouth. 

Rogers doesn’t seem to get the memo, though. His mouth twists into a bitter smile like he never quite learned when to keep his damn mouth shut, and the next thing he says is, “You act like just because we’re poor and from a bad side of town we’re too stupid to make our own decisions or tell right from wrong. But, hey, I guess it must be real easy to be a good man from the safety of your pulpit, huh, Father?”

“I’m a preacher, not a priest, you ignorant warhawk,” Gideon snaps back over his shoulder as Sarah keeps him firmly facing forward and wandering down Broadway. “And Europe can take care of itself. We got plenty of problems of our own, and you sure as Hell don’t have any damn right to use them as a stepping stone to send American soldiers off to play world police in the Middle East.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that campaign,” Rogers says, an angry flush spreading down his neck to disappear under shirt collar. “And I never said that I wanted to go to war —”

“You _volunteered_ , didn’t you?” Gideon spits, breaking free of Sarah’s hold and whirling around as they all come to a stop in front of one of the traffic barricades at the blocked off end of the fair space. “Nobody drafted your ass into the Army.”

“Oh my God, shut up, ‘Deon!” Sarah half-shouts at him. She makes an apologetic face at Sam, scrambling to find a way out of this train wreck of a conversation, but it’s too late. He can feel their history bubbling up between them, all those years of backhanded comments and disapproval and disappointment coming to an awful head with Rogers caught in the middle as the unfortunate catalyst. The three of them — Sam, Gideon, Rogers — are rooted in place, watching each other like circling sharks, waiting to see who will spill first blood.

“Nobody drafted my ass, either,” Sam points out when his well of patience runs dry, each subsequent element in his argument barked with the staccato rage of machine gun fire. “I volunteered. Hell, I re-upped when my initial contract was over and went back for a second tour. That shitshow was _my_ campaign. I was in Afghanistan _and_ Iraq. What, you think I carried a rifle for show? ‘Cause it looked good with my fatigues? I was pararescue, not the Red fuckin’ Cross, so come on, asshole." He feels guilty and ashamed at his own outburst, and mad as hell at Gideon for getting to him like this. For dragging him into this mess yet again when he’d just wanted to come out and pretend to be normal for a bit. Sam puts his hands on Gideon’s broad chest and shoves his brother back a step. "You want to spit shit and talk tough? Let's hear it! Call me a murderer, and tell me how I let myself be used and we were all just pawns in some rich fuck’s war game for oil. Say it! I know that’s what you think.”

“We did go over there under false pretenses!” Gideon pushes back, and he has enough extra weight on his side that it makes Sam stumble back two steps to his one. “You can’t pretend that we didn’t. You were there! You know there were no WMDs —”

It would have been bad enough for Gideon to have insinuated that Riley might have died for nothing. Sometimes, in Sam’s darker moments, he can’t help but think that, too. He was never under the impression that they would bring peace to the Middle East, that they would win over the hearts and minds of the people there, but he’d always believed that they were truly trying to do the right thing. It wasn’t always clear what that meant and it was almost never easy, but damnit, they _tried_.

But _this_ , the idea that they brought it on themselves for being somewhere they had no business being, was more than Sam could bear.

Sam grabs Gideon’s lapels and drags him in close, nose to nose to snarl, “Just come out and say it, you coward. Say you think our troops who died over there _deserved it_.”

Gideon scowls, but it’s Rogers who speaks up next, making an attempt to diffuse the situation now that Sam is escalating it. He puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder and eases him off his brother. “Look, I get that you don’t think we should have been there, but someone had to do something and that ‘someone’ was us. The men we fought put on enemy uniforms and didn’t use any of the opportunities we gave them to surrender. They knew the consequences and they made their choice.”

“You can’t tell me that you honestly think they always get a choice,” Gideon says as he straightens his jacket out, livid in his disbelief at Rogers’s stance. Sam’s hands are shaking, and ache with the desire to lash out. 

“Choosing between working with the devil and dying up against the wall is still a choice,” Rogers replies.

“What the fuck,” Sarah whispers, wide-eyed, at the same time that Gideon shouts back at Rogers, “No it’s not!”

“You’re a man of the cloth. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t die for your principles, that you wouldn’t rather save your soul than your skin —“

“You can’t ask people to choose between survival and —“

“The world asks you to make that choice every day!” Rogers interrupts. “There’s always a crueler option, Gideon, and we choose not to use it because how we live matters. We could steal what we need, but instead we work for it. Even when it would be so much easier to just take what we wanted, we don’t. We earn it. And it’s easy to sit back and say that you can’t ask people to choose, but you make those same choices every time you get up and choose to take the harder right over the easy wrong. ’Surviving’ isn’t the same thing as ‘living,’ and sometimes living means choosing the final ground you’ll die on.”

“Did a lot of people choose to die for you?” Gideon asks, biting and scathing in his assessment of Rogers’s character. Rogers recoils like Gideon shot him in the gut, and Sam thinks about Rogers’s sergeant from this morning. Sam grabs Rogers by the wrist of his free hand before he takes a swing and knocks Gideon’s head clean off his shoulders. His other arm comes up, the wheel case laying across his forearm like he plans to snap it forward to smash into Gideon’s face. It looks like that would be easy for Rogers, like the motions are practiced and familiar. “Were you good at getting people to make that choice, before the Army let you go?”

“The Army didn’t let me go,” Rogers practically growls through clenched teeth. “I was KIA in a plane crash.”

“Oh.” A beat, and Gideon’s conscientious anger falters for a moment in the aftermath of that admission and they all go quiet. Sam blinks in surprise. Rogers hadn’t mentioned anything about a plane crash yesterday, but Sam hadn’t really asked. He had just assumed it was some kind of dishonorable action that got him discharged; Rogers’s timeline doesn’t make sense with any kind of medical care or review that Sam’s ever heard of in any branch of service. Gideon’s next question is automatic, clearly out of his mouth without much thought to the callousness of the inquiry, "Mechanical malfunction or pilot error?”

“Neither,” Rogers corrects him flatly and without relish. A couple of people are staring at them. Someone has their phone out and turned in their direction like they’re waiting for either Sam or Rogers to finally lose their last bit of chill and throw Gideon over the barricade. "They had a bomb on board and were headed for Times Square. I wasn’t about to let New York become the next Pearl Harbor, so I chose to crash the plane and kill everyone on board.” Gideon looks away sharply. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Rogers says, sounding anything but. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

Gideon lets out an uncommitted grunt but doesn’t turn back to look, awkward and still fuming, as Rogers fixes Sam with a half-contained smirk and a raised brow. It’s hard to argue with a sacrifice play like that, after all. 

Sarah elbows Sam hard in the side as she breaks up their circle and forcibly marches Gideon back up the street under the guise of wanting to explore the other side’s wares. She tries valiantly to keep Gideon’s attention off the others by pointing out a rack of scarves she likes and scolds Sam and Rogers for not seeming interested in getting any knick-knacks. The distraction doesn’t work, but it does succeed in moving them so close to the crowds that none of them want to risk endangering bystanders.

“What do you think?” Sarah asks, talking too loud in a blatant and unrefined attempt to derail the conversation. She drapes her old blue scarf around Sam’s neck as she tries on a shimmering beige one.

“It really brings out your eyes,” Sam informs her in his most deadpan and uninterested tone.

“Very snazzy,” Rogers agrees with the same undue seriousness.

“God, you’re the worst,” Sarah announces, tossing her hair back with a pout and regale shake of her head. “No wonder I never invite you guys anywhere.” It earns a tight laugh from the men, and Gideon and Rogers, in silent mutual understanding, give each other a nod and agree to shelve their differences for the time being. 

Sam can’t shake the feeling that something about Rogers’s story doesn’t sound right. It’s not impossible, of course. Sam’s pretty well-versed in the kinds of crucial defense operations that don’t get news stories, so he’s not surprised that none of them had heard about the thwarting of an attempted terrorist attack. But the wording is a little off, like how Rogers mentioned the Eastern Front when talking about being stationed in Italy, and the more he turns it over in his head the less it makes sense:

Why bring up Pearl Harbor when there’s a much more recent and direct attack on New York City involving a plane he could have used as an analogy?

They continue back toward Union Square, and Sam manages to convince Rogers to try a sopapilla when they all realize that he has no idea what they are. As he finishes, Sam nudges Rogers with his shoulder and offers him a quiet apology on all their behalfs before asking, “You’re not still hurt, are you?” in a soft voice. Rogers just shakes his head and deposits his trash in one of the nearby bins before they follow the other Wilsons through the sparse greenery of the little park.

“No, it. . . it wasn’t recent, or anything,” he assures Sam. “I was. . . I was kind of in a coma for awhile, I guess.”

“You guess?” Sam frowns, brows knit with concern and no lack of confusion.

“It’s complicated,” Rogers hedges, not looking Sam in the face. Sam sighs and lets the subject drop, much to Rogers’s obvious relief.

Gideon is much more interested in the Greenmarket than he was in the street fair booths. They hover around honey vendors and someone selling more kinds of beets than Sam even knew existed. Sarah gets a carton of early spring strawberries. Gideon argues over the price of jam with an old woman that Sam's pretty sure is about to beat his ass if he doesn't buy something soon. There are booths brimming with flowers that Rogers pauses in front of, admiring the displays for a moment before rejoining Sam as they begin the return trek toward the entrance to the subway.

“Aren't you cold?” Sam asks, glancing over Rogers's thin jacket. He had redressed in the clothes he brought with him, having washed them in the sink and hung them up to dry after his shower the night before. Sam was impressed that they weren't still damp. Rogers shrugs.

“Not really? I've been colder,” he answers, which earns him a snort and a pointed look from Sam. He adds hesitantly, “I. . . I crashed the plane in the ice. And, uh, I haven't really felt warm since I got back, so it's hard for me to tell.”

Sam unwraps his sister's scarf from around his neck and holds it out to Rogers in offering. Rogers accepts it with another small smile, head tilted down as he wraps it around his neck. He looks back up at Sam through his long lashes and Sam is struck again by how handsome he is. By how much he doesn't look or sound like Riley. He quickly turns away, clearing his throat.

They're just standing there, Sam trying to think of what to say next, when the explosion goes off on the southern end of Union Square.


End file.
